What is the validity of myocardial infarction diagnoses in administrative databases and death certificates?
Hospitalization data should be preferred over vital statistics data for confirming deaths from myocardial infarction in administrative database research due to higher diagnostic validity.
Hospitalization data has higher validity and hence can be used to identify MI, but the accuracy of MI as a cause-of-death on death certificates is suboptimal, and more studies are needed on the validity of ICD-10 codes. When using administrative data for research purposes, authors should recognize these factors and avoid using vital statistics data if hospitalization data is not available to confirm deaths from MI.
McCormick et al. (Fri,) studied this question.