Statistical Analysis of Age Reporting Errors by Insured and Uninsured Patients in Cape Coast Teaching Hospital of Ghana

Abstract

Age is a very important variable that guides clinicians to carryout diagnosis, treatment, as well as administering medical procedures to patients. Misreporting of age by patients to clinicians can have dire consequences on the patients’ health. This retrospective study used a 10 year demographic data involving the ages reported by 906,383 patients. Demographic indexes such as Whipples, Myers Blended and Joint Score were employed to analyse reported ages among insured and uninsured patients at the Cape Coast Teaching Hospital. The computed joint score values of 76.88 and 85.60 respectively for uninsured and insured patients qualified the data as highly inaccurate by the standards of interpretation of UN index. The summary of the digit preference of the uninsured and insured patients by Myers blended index approach were 29.34 and 29.87 respectively. The blended sum at the digits 0, 1, 2 and 5 exceeded 10% of the total blended population, an indication of over selection of ages ending in those digits by the insured and uninsured patients. Whipple’s index for uninsured and insured patients was 149.3 and 287.1 respectively. These values respectively show that the reliability of the ages reported were rough and very rough, by the Whipple’s index interpretation standards. The insured were found to have higher tendency of concentrating on ages ending in 0 and 5 than the uninsured. The study concluded that age data in Cape Coast Teaching Hospital is misreported and inaccurate and if not adjusted may result in wrong age-dependent medical procedures undertaken by clinicians. It was recommended among others for hospitals to institute innovative ways of recording ages such as using calendar of historical events technique where the patients could not recall their correct age.