Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been recognised as a public health problem in China, but more population-level evidence on care utilisation and quality of care is needed.1 To better monitor health-care outcomes after TBI, we propose the use of data from the hospital quality-monitoring system, with a minor change on the standardised format of the front page of inpatient medical records. The hospital quality-monitoring system is a national database managed by the National Health Commission that collects information from the front page of inpatient medical records from all tertiary hospitals in China since 2013. This information has already been used as the data source for the national reports on the quality and safety of health care from 2015 to 2017,2 as well as the annual reports from the China kidney disease network.3 Data submission was mandatory for over 900 tertiary hospitals from 31 provinces and the system had collected over 40 million records by the end of 2015.3 The template of the front page of inpatient medical records contained primary and secondary diagnoses coded using the international classification of diseases (ICDs), as well as data on operations, meaning that the records of patients with TBI (which include information on comorbidities and treatments) can be identified. Information on masked patient identifier and discharge status (ie, transfer to other hospitals or death) are also included so that further analyses on the in-hospital mortality and readmission of patients with TBI are feasible ...
Language: en
LA - en SN - 1474-4422 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1474-4422(19)30237-6 ID - ref1 ER -