Four-year ICD-10-coded hospital diagnoses at a tertiary center in South Lebanon (2020–2023): a descriptive analysis of 26,727 patients

The progressive implementation of electronic health records and standardized ICD-10 coding provides an opportunity to characterize hospital-based disease patterns and strengthen health information systems in settings where routinely available epidemiological data remain limited. In Lebanon, systematic analyses of longitudinal ICD-10-coded hospital data remain scarce, particularly in South Lebanon. Such data may provide important insights into frequently recorded conditions, including cardiovascular diseases, and support the development of more comprehensive electronic health information and surveillance systems. This study aimed to characterize the distribution of ICD-10-coded diagnoses among hospitalized patients at a tertiary healthcare center in South Lebanon between 2020 and 2023, with particular attention to variations according to sex and age. This study is a retrospective secondary data analysis examining hospitalization data from the Sheikh Ragheb Harb University Hospital (SRHUH), a tertiary healthcare center in Nabatieh, South Lebanon. The data analyzed covered a four-year period from January 2020 to December 2023. The study population included Lebanese citizens of all ages living in Nabatieh and surrounding areas who were hospitalized during this period. Codes and titles correspond to the WHO international version of ICD-10; In total, 61.0% of codes were recorded at the three-character level only. To avoid counting a parent category and its sub-categories as different diagnoses, all codes were aggregated to the WHO three-character category. Analyses were performed in Python 3.12 (pandas 2.2) with automated checks that all tables and figures reconcile with the analytical dataset. 26,727 patients were included, with each patient contributing a single ICD-10 code. The median age was 35 years (IQR 23–60). 10,339 patients (38.7%) were aged over 45 years. Among male patients, angina pectoris was the most frequently recorded category in every year: 13.4% of male patients in 2020 and 10.7% in 2023. Among female patients, single delivery by caesarean section (O82) was the most frequently recorded category, accounting for 21.8% of female patients in 2020 and 26.9% in 2023. 3,796 patients (14.2%) had a recorded code in one of the seven selected cardiovascular categories. Angina pectoris was the most frequent (8.2% of all patients), followed by chronic ischemic heart disease (2.2%) and heart failure (1.3%). The findings of this study may contribute to a better understanding of hospital-based diagnostic patterns and support improvements in clinical coding practices, healthcare service evaluation, and hospital resource planning. These findings describe recorded codes among selected patients at one hospital and are not estimates of regional disease burden. Further studies using more comprehensive and representative datasets are warranted to better characterize disease patterns and inform evidence-based healthcare planning. Not applicable.