Survive / Expired

The Survive / Expired / Autopsy field tracks if a patient survived to be discharged, and if not, whether there was an autopsy.

Data encoding

This is one field on the PDA and in CCMDB.mdb. It is two fields (survive/expire) and (autopsy) in Ed's database. It was implemented as a single field to prevent the combination survive/autopsy.

Discussion

Discontinue collection whether Autopsy was done (pending)

The following refers to an ongoing discussion, not to a change in collection rules. You will be advised when the change will be implemented.

As discussed in the Critical Care Review Group, our current collection practice is likely to miss whether a patient had an autopsy. When the patient dies we do not necessarily go back to their chart to find out if an autopsy happened. If this data is unreliable we should not be collecting it in this way. The steering committee has accepted this recommendation. (right Trish?)

We plan to stop collecting whether or not an Autopsy was done. The current version of CCMDB.mdb still requires this field to be completed, and the current version of HanDBase will not be changed to remove this field, so we need to find a way to implement this. To that end, the topic has been added to postponed changes log because we are waiting for further, bigger changes in the collection of discharge data.

In the meantime we could stop collecting "autopsy" now. I could change the CCMDB.mdb send functionality to always send autopsy as "no". This would be a quick and easy change. Trish, what are your thoughts? Ttenbergen 10:27, 23 April 2009 (CDT)