• Natalie J Shiff, Sadia Jama, Catherine Boden, and Lisa M Lix.
• Department of Pediatrics, College of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan, 103 Hospital Drive, SK S7N 0W8, Saskatoon, Canada. natalie.shiff@usask.ca.
• Bmc Health Serv Res. 2014 Jan 1; 14: 236.

BackgroundThe purpose of this research was to perform a scoping review of published literature on the validity of administrative health data for ascertaining health conditions in the pediatric population (≤20 years).MethodsA comprehensive search of OVID Medline (1946 - present), CINAHL (1937 - present) and EMBASE (1947 - present) was conducted. Characteristics of validation studies that were abstracted included the study population, health condition, topic of the validation (e.g., single diagnosis code versus case-finding algorithm), administrative and validation data sources. Inter-rater agreement was measured using Cohen's κ. Extracted data were analyzed using descriptive statistics.ResultsA total of 37 articles met the study inclusion criteria. Cohen's κ for study inclusion/exclusion and data abstraction was 0.88 and 0.97, respectively. Most studies validated administrative data from the USA (43.2%) and Canada (24.3%), and focused on inpatient records (67.6%). Case-finding algorithms (56.7%) were more frequently validated than diagnoses codes alone (37.8%). Five conditions were validated in more than one study: diabetes mellitus, inflammatory bowel disease, asthma, rotavirus infection, and tuberculosis.ConclusionsThis scoping review identified a number of gaps in the validation of administrative health data for pediatric populations, including limited investigation of outpatient populations and older pediatric age groups.

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