Methods for Ensuring High Quality of Coding of Cause of Death. The Mortality Register to Follow Southern Urals Populations Exposed to Radiation.
BACKGROUND
To follow up populations exposed to several radiation accidents in the Southern Urals, a cause-of-death registry was established at the Urals Center capturing deaths in the Chelyabinsk, Kurgan and Sverdlovsk region since 1950.


OBJECTIVE
When registering deaths over such a long time period, quality measures need to be in place to maintain quality and reduce the impact of individual coders as well as quality changes in death certificates.


METHODS
To ensure the uniformity of coding, a method for semi-automatic coding was developed, which is described here. Briefly, the method is based on a dynamic thesaurus, database-supported coding and parallel coding by two different individuals.


RESULTS
A comparison of the proposed method for organizing the coding process with the common procedure of coding showed good agreement, with, at the end of the coding process, 70  - 90% agreement for the three-digit ICD -9 rubrics.


CONCLUSIONS
The semi-automatic method ensures a sufficiently high quality of coding by at the same time providing an opportunity to reduce the labor intensity inherent in the creation of large-volume cause-of-death registries.
Nikolaj Startsev, Urals Research Center for Radiation Medicine, 68a st. Vorovskogo, 454076, Chelyabinsk, Russia, E-mail: startsev@urcrm.ru.
N
N
Startsev
P
P
Dimov
B
B
Grosche
F
F
Tretyakov
J
J
Schüz
A
A
Akleyev
D002423:Cause of Death; D059019:Clinical Coding / Q000592:standards*; D003644:Death Certificates; D006801:Humans; D038801:International Classification of Diseases; D058996:Quality Improvement; D018788:Radioactive Hazard Release / Q000401:mortality*; D012042:Registries; D012426:Russia
International Classification of Diseases (ICD); Mortality register; Russia; cause of death; radiation