European journal of public health
-
Eur J Public Health · Feb 2015
Comparative StudyComparing the performance of the Charlson/Deyo and Elixhauser comorbidity measures across five European countries and three conditions.
The Charlson and Elixhauser comorbidity measures are commonly used methods to account for patient comorbidities in hospital-level comparisons of clinical quality using administrative data. Both have been validated in North America, but there is less evidence of their performance in Europe and in pooled cross-country data, which are features of the European Collaboration for Healthcare Optimization (ECHO) project. This study compares the performance of the Charlson/Deyo and Elixhauser comorbidity measures in predicting in-hospital mortality using data from five European countries in three inpatient groups. ⋯ The Elixhauser list contains more comorbidities, which may enable it to achieve better discrimination than the Charlson measure. Both measures achieve similar calibration, so for the purpose of ECHO we judged the Elixhauser measure to be preferable.