How well do NSW hospital data identify cases of heart failure?

To the Editor: Large administrative datasets are increasingly being used for health research; validation studies are critical to understanding data quality, in particular that coding accurately reflects the clinical condition under study. We compared heart failure coding and the associated comorbidity burden using the New South Wales Admitted Patient Data Collection (APDC) with the clinical data in patient medical records (the “gold standard”). The APDC contains about 26 million records generated since 2000 of all public and private hospital admissions, with reasons for admission and clinical diagnosis.