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Concordance between coding sources of burn size and depth across Australian and New Zealand specialist burn services
Monica Perkins1, Heather Cleland2,3, Belinda J Gabbe1,4
1School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
Background:
The percentage of total body surface area (%TBSA) burned and burn depth provide valuable information on burn injury severity.
Objective:
This study investigated the concordance between The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision, Australian Modification (ICD-10-AM) codes and expert burn clinicians in assessing burn injury severity.
Method:
We conducted a retrospective population-based review of all patients who sustained a burn injury between July 1, 2009, and June 30, 2019, requiring admission into a specialist burn service across Australia and New Zealand. The %TBSA burned (including the percentage of full thickness burns) recorded by expert burn clinicians within the Burns Registry of Australia and New Zealand (BRANZ) were compared to ICD-10-AM coding.
Results:
20,642 cases (71.5%) with ICD-10-AM code data were recorded. Overall, kappa scores (95% confidence interval [CI]) for burn size ranged from 0.64 (95% CI 0.63-0.66) to 0.86 (95% CI 0.78-0.94) indicating substantial to almost perfect agreement across all %TBSA groups. When stratified by depth, the lowest agreement was observed for < 10% TBSA and < 10% full thickness (kappa 0.03; 95% CI 0.02-0.04) and the highest agreement was observed for burns of ≥ 90% TBSA and ≥ 90% full thickness (kappa 0.72; 95% CI 0.58-0.85).
Conclusion:
Overall, there was substantial agreement between the BRANZ and ICD-10-AM coded data for %TBSA classification. When %TBSA classification was stratified by burn depth, greater agreement was observed for larger and deeper burns compared with smaller and superficial burns.
Implications:
Greater consistency in the classification of burns is needed.
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