Inaccuracy of asthma-related self-reported health-care utilization data compared to Medicaid claims.

Inaccuracy of asthma-related self-reported health-care utilization data compared to Medicaid claims. J Asthma. 2018 Aug 09;:1-7 Authors: Hollenbach J, Villarreal M, Simoneau T, Langton C, Mitchell H, Flores G, Cloutier M, Szefler S Abstract In asthma, health-care utilization is often used as an outcome measure and to identify cases of poorly controlled asthma. Asthma-related hospitalizations, emergency department (ED) visits, and systemic corticosteroid courses were compared between caregiver report and Medicaid administrative claims over 12 months among children enrolled in a school-based asthma program. The concordance was poor for both caregiver-reported ED visits and systemic corticosteroid courses (k = 0.04 and k = 0.02, respectively) and fair (k = 0.21) for hospitalizations. The percent of caregivers with disagreement among sources was hospitalizations = 75%; ED visits = 75%; and systemic corticosteroids = 84%. The data sources resulted in pronounced differences in estimates at the individual level, suggesting that caregiver-reported data sources are not accurate when using insurance claims as the gold standard. We recommend investigators thoughtfully consider study design when deciding upon the data source for asthma-related utilization. PMID: 30091938 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Journal of Asthma - Category: Respiratory Medicine Tags: J Asthma Source Type: research