Abstract
Objectives: To compare falls and fall-related injuries that a fall evaluator or hospital incident report identified with injuries identified according to discharge International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM) codes for the same set of inpatient episodes of care. Design: Prospective, descriptive study. Setting: Sixteen adult general medical and surgical units in a major urban teaching hospital. Participants: All adults who sustained a fall with injury during a 5-year period (380 falls with injury). Measurements: Falls that a fall evaluator or hospital incident report identified were classified according to their injury severity. Discharge abstracts provided diagnosis codes (ICD-9-CM) for the discharge, including fall-related injury codes. Results: Three hundred forty-three inpatient falls with injury (90.2%) resulted in temporary harm to the individual; the remaining 37 falls (9.8%) resulted in more-serious harm. Sixteen of the 37 falls with injury extending hospitalization or resulting in death were identified using Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)-targeted injury code ranges combined with present-on-admission indicators. Of the 21 falls with injury that were not identified, nine (42.9%) lacked documentation of any injury, and seven (33.3%) identified other injuries outside the CMS-targeted injury code ranges. Conclusion: The CMS-targeted ICD-9-CM codes used to identify fall-related injuries in claims data do not always detect the most-serious falls.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 2186-2191 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | Journal of the American Geriatrics Society |
Volume | 61 |
Issue number | 12 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 2013 |
Keywords
- ICD-9-CM codes
- fall-related injuries
- hospital-acquired conditions
- inpatient falls
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Geriatrics and Gerontology