Validation of the rates of adverse event incidence in administrative healthcare data through patient chart review: A scoping review protocol.

Background: Patient safety is a key issue for health systems and a growing global public health challenge. Administrative healthcare data provide a coded summary of a patient and their encounter with the healthcare system. These aggregated datasets are often used to inform research and decisions relating to health service planning and therefore it is vital that they are accurate and reliable. Given the reported inaccuracy of these datasets for detecting and recording adverse events, there have been calls for validation studies to explore their reliability and investigate further their potential to inform research and health policy. Researchers have since carried out validation studies on the rates of adverse events in administrative data through chart reviews therefore, it seems appropriate to identify and chart the evidence and results of these studies within a scoping review.

Methods: The scoping review will be conducted in accordance with the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) methodology for scoping reviews. A search of databases such as PubMed, CINAHL, ScienceDirect and Scopus will be conducted in addition to a search of the reference lists of sourced publications and a search for grey literature. Following this, Covidence will be used to screen the sourced publications and subsequently extract data from the included sources. A numerical summary of the literature will be presented in addition to a charting based on the qualitative content analysis of the studies included.

Conclusions: This protocol provides the structure for the conduct of a review to identify and chart the evidence on validation studies on rates of adverse events in administrative healthcare data. This review will aim to identify research gaps, chart the evidence of and highlight any flaws within administrative datasets to improve extraction and coding practices and enable researchers and policy makers to use these data to their full potential.