Question
A researcher is using the Discharge Abstract Database (DAD), and has the following question:
The codes in the Intervention frequency table REPEAT as you move down the table. I'm not sure how to interpret this. Are they listed in chronological order in terms of when they were reported/recorded, such that if I add up all of the frequencies reported for each code in the entire table from start to finish, I will be summing the total reported frequency for the 2 year reported time period (ex. 2009-2011)? I think this is the case, but want to be sure before moving forward.
Answer
As far as the variables themselves go, all that we know is that the responses to I_CCI_1 were the “Most important and resource intensive intervention performed during the patient’s stay.” I don’t believe that there is necessarily any relationship between the other variables in terms of timing – it would, possibly, have depended on when the records in the hospital/reporting unit were updated, or more than one intervention might have occurred more or less concurrently (and the order depended on the person doing the inputting, or the department doing the inputting, if multiple departments might be involved). This is something that I think would need to be explored more with CIHI.
In the frequency tables which I prepared (to which I’m assuming the researcher is referring), the researcher is correct – if the researchers sums all 20 responses for, for example, intervention 1AA52SETS, they will find out the total number of times that that intervention was reported on the file. That will not necessarily match the number of patients on whom the intervention was performed – the same intervention might be reported more than once for the same patient record (I don’t know this to be true, but I also don’t know it to be false).
