Hospital discharge data

The quality of the data in patient registers, such as representativeness, completeness and reliability, is important. Nordic hospital data have a high degree of coverage. However, there are some caveats which need to be kept in mind.

Statistics on diseases only show main diagnoses. This means that hospital statistics do not give a complete picture of the diseases treated in hospital, since secondary diagnoses, that also have been attended to during a hospital stay, are not reflected. 

Comparisons between countries are hampered by the fact that there are some differences in the way the WHO definition of main condition is interpreted in the Nordic countries. The countries most often choose the most severe medical condition as the primary diagnoses. The introduction of Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG) has influenced the choice of main diagnosis in all the countries, and some countries have started to code the medical condition which is most costly for the health system as the primary diagnoses.

There are also national differences in diagnostic tradition and differences in registration and coding of diagnoses that influence comparability.

Healthy new-born babies are counted differently in the Nordic countries. In the ICD-10, there is a category (Z38) and in the ISHMT (International Shortlist for Hospital Morbidity Tabulation) list, there is a group for healthy new-born babies. In some of the countries, these babies are not registered as patients, thus they are not included in the patient registers. Therefore, healthy new-born babies are excluded from the tables in this section.