In the United States, 800,000-1.4 million people are chronically infected with hepatitis B virus (HBV); these persons are at increased risk for chronic liver disease and its sequelae. Current national viral hepatitis surveillance is a passive laboratory-initiated reporting system to state or local health departments with only 39 health departments reporting chronic HBV infection in the National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System. Since active HBV surveillance can be expensive and labor-intensive, the ICD-9 coding system has been proposed for surveillance of chronic hepatitis B.
Objective
To evaluate the sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values of the ICD-9 coding system for surveillance of chronic hepatitis B virus infection (HBV) using data from an observational cohort study in which ICD-9-coded HBV cases were validated by chart review