News: Providers could improve the sensitivity of ICD-10-CM flu diagnoses, study finds

A study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that ICD-10-CM influenza codes accurately represented cases of positive diagnoses in pediatric patients, but their sensitivity in identifying cases of the illness was modest.

“Sensitivity is the proportion of true positives tests out of all patients with a condition,” according to the National Library of Medicine’s StatPearls. In other words, in this context, it is the ability to accurately detect those who have a condition or disease and those who do not.

The researchers pulled information from over 32,000 cases of children who presented to the emergency department (ED) or inpatient settings with fever, cough, earache, congestion, vomiting, shortness of breath, and other respiratory symptoms between December 1, 2016, and March 31, 2020.

The study concluded that the reporting of the codes was highly specific (98% for ED, 98.2% for inpatient), but were only moderately sensitive in recognizing laboratory-confirmed cases (48.6% for ED, 70% for inpatient).

The patients who have been identified to have a disease or condition and truly have the condition, according to lab tests, are referred to as “true positives.” Inversely, patients who have been identified to not have a disease or condition and truly do not have it are “true negatives.” If a patient is diagnosed with the disease or condition and does not actually have it, they are referred to as “false positives.” If a patient does have a condition or disease and is not diagnosed with it or the disease is not detected, they are “false negatives.”

Misclassified cases of false positives were later attributed to respiratory syncytial virus, rhinovirus, upper respiratory infections, and other respiratory diseases.

Study authors wrote they hope that “these findings may aid interpretation of studies that use ICD-10 diagnosis codes to identify cases of influenza illness.”

Editor’s note: This article was republished from JustCoding and can be found here. To read the JAMA Study, click here.