Feasibility of using administrative data to compare hospital performance in the European Union

The use of administrative data for quality assessment and improvement purposes has been criticized for its lack of specificity, varying coding practices that result in performance variations and lack of documentation on secondary diagnoses that impede risk adjustment. Problems with using administrative data for international benchmarking have been discussed previously, and data quality and unique personal identifiers are concluded to be a main issue. In addition, the task of retrieving, cleaning and presenting data is time-consuming and complex and requires skills and capacities at hospital level. However, revisions and improvements in accuracy of coding have substantially improved the validity of indicators derived from administrative data, even with the view to use them in international comparisons [9–12].

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Given the potential future applications of administrative databases for comparisons of hospital performance, the objective of this paper was to describe hospitals' organizational arrangements relevant to the abstraction of administrative data, report on the completeness of administrative data collected in the eight countries and assess associations between the organizational arrangements and completeness of data submission.