Obtaining Missing Race for Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) Patients Using Multiple Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Administrative Databases

• Activity Number: 362
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 2, 2011 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Government Statistics
• Author(s): Nancy J. Petersen*+ and Hong Jen Yu+ and G. John Chen
• Companies: Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Veterans Affairs
• Keywords: Administrative databases ; race ; data quality

Abstract

Background: A large proportion of Veterans who receive care in VA have missing race information if race is determined using a single clinical data source. VA administrative databases include inpatient, outpatient, pharmacy, lab and cost data. Race is included in some databases but it may be missing for many patients. For a study examining racial differences in services in CKD patients derived from a lab dataset that did not contain race, we obtained race using inpatient and outpatient files. Methods: We determined the percent of patients with missing values for race in the inpatient and outpatient datasets from fiscal years (FYs) 1997-2010. We used an algorithm to look at all years simultaneously to extract any values of race that might be in the files. Results: The percent missing race ranged from 42.8% in FY97 to 20.8% in FY10 for outpatient files and 2.9% to 56.0% for inpatient files. After combining files across all years, we obtained race on 84.5% of the 1.2 million CKD patients. Conclusions: Examining multiple years simultaneously allowed us to obtain race for a high percent of our study patients that would have been missing if we used a single clinical database.