In July 2016, 77% of ED data was transmitted daily via Health Level 7 (HL7) messages, compared to only 27% in July 2015 (Figure). During this same period, chief complaint (CC) word count has increased from an average of 3.8 words to 6.0 words, with a twenty-fold increase in the appearance of the word “denies” in the chief complaint (Figure). While HL7 messages provide robust chief complaint data, this may also introduce errors that could lead to symptom and syndrome misclassification.
Objective
To describe the effect of symptom negation in emergency department (ED) chief complaint data received by the New York City (NYC) Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), and to devise a solution to avoid syndrome and symptom misclassification for commonly used negations using SAS Perl Regular Expression (PRX) functions.