Improving Validity of Cause of Death on Death Certificates

Abstract

Accurate reporting of causes of death on death certificates is essential to formulate appropriate disease control, prevention and emergency response by national health-protection institutions such as Center for disease prevention and control (CDC). In this study, we utilize knowledge from publicly available expert-formulated rules for the cause of death to determine the extent of discordance in the death certificates in national mortality data with the expert knowledge base. We also report the most commonly occurring invalid causal pairs which physicians put in the death certificates. We use sequence rule mining to find patterns that are most frequent on death certificates and compare them with the rules from the expert knowledge based. Based on our results, 20.1% of the common patterns derived from entries into death certificates were discordant. The most probable causes of these discordance or invalid rules are missing steps and non-specific ICD-10 codes on the death certificates.