Construction and Quality Evaluation of the Japanese Rehabilitation Nutrition Database

Nutritional complications frequently occur among patients undergoing rehabilitation, and the importance of nutrition in these patients has been emphasized. However, there is not enough evidence available on rehabilitation nutrition. The Japan Rehabilitation Nutrition Database was set up to reflect the real-world clinical practice of rehabilitation nutrition. This paper describes the construction and quality evaluation of the registry database. We constructed a large-scale database that can be used for the clinical research of nutrition for rehabilitation. To verify the data, a simple comparison of the numbers of cases, data loss, data duplication, data type errors, out of range values, and input errors in the option columns was performed. From March 2016 to June 2017, 797 cases were registered in the rehabilitation database from 18 facilities. The variable entry error frequency ranges from 0% to 0.4% and the frequency of a main item missing from 0.4% to 10.9%. Energy intake on hospitalization was missing in 10.9% of cases, and Mini Nutritional Assessment Short Form and Food Intake LEVEL Scale on hospitalization was missing in 9.7% of cases. Stroke accounted for 45.7% of the diseases registered, pneumonia for 36.5%, and proximal femoral fracture for 17.8%. Through the use of this database, research on rehabilitation nutrition can be conducted, and there is a possibility that useful results for future clinical practice may be obtained. Verification of the secondary use of the database is becoming the basis for evidence-based nutritional rehabilitation.