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Pregnancy-related clinical codes in unlikely populations in primary care
Helen Curtis;
Peter Inglesby;
Ben Goldacre;
Rose Higgins;
Amir Mehrkar;
Sebastian Bacon;
Brian MacKenna
ABSTRACT
We discovered that the official national UK SNOMED CT codelist for identifying pregnant people during the COVID-19 pandemic identified pregnancy in people who were very unlikely to be pregnant (for example, elderly men). Analysing usage patterns of the individual codes identified a principal code describing a specific foetal position in labour (“knee presentation”) incorrectly used to code knee complaints. The absence of “foetal”, or ”pregnancy” in the code description is a likely contributory factor. This is an informative example of commonly overlooked problems in creating and using clinical data.
Citation
Please cite as:
Curtis H, Inglesby P, Goldacre B, Higgins R, Mehrkar A, Bacon S, MacKenna B
Pregnancy-Related Clinical Codes in Unlikely Populations in Primary Care