Increase in the use of additional diagnoses in hospitals
Between 2015 and 2022, there has been a 25 per cent increase in the number of additional diagnoses per consultation at Norwegian hospitals. The number of additional diagnoses per admission has not changed during this period.
At all consultations and hospital admissions, the doctor must provide at least one diagnosis code that gives information about why the patient was there, a primary diagnosis. If the patient has multiple conditions that are relevant to the healthcare provided, this must also be documented by recording additional diagnoses or secondary diagnoses.
As part of the work on updating the health atlas, SKDE has investigated whether there have been changes in the registration of additional diagnoses over the years that could affect the results. The results show that for outpatient consultations and day treatment, there has been an increase in the number of additional diagnoses per consultation.
— This means that if one counts the number of outpatient contacts per year, for example for the diagnosis of heart failure, and finds an increase over time, it may partly be due to changed registration practices at hospitals, explains analyst Mattias Ugelvik.
— This is not entirely unexpected; there is a reason we were curious about this and chose to investigate it, says Hanne Sigrun Byhring, who leads the analysis section at SKDE.
Det kan selvsagt hende at økningen i registrering av tilleggsdiagnoser over år delvis skyldes at pasienter på norske sykehus har flere sykdommer nå enn før, men vi tror nok at det hovedsakelig skyldes endringer i registreringspraksis.
— Regardless of the reason, it is important to keep this in mind when interpreting the results of analyses where we look at developments over many years, explains Byhring.
Here you can read more about geographical variation in the number of diagnoses in NPR.
