This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

A. Russell Localio, JD, MPH, MS; J. Richard Landis, PhD
Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine Hershey

JAMA. 1995;274(20):1585-1586.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—Dr Ellerbeck and colleagues¹ support the accuracy of their abstraction of clinical indicators from medical records using statistics based on duplicate reviews of 912 records. However, the statistic is inappropriate and uninformative in this application, since measures agreement, corrected for chance, between reviewers when the true finding is not known,² whereas in chart abstraction the presence or absence of an indicator can be ascertained with certainty.

More appropriate measures of accuracy are sensitivity and specificity.³ In this setting, sensitivity is the proportion of cases correctly identified when the indicator is present in the medical record, while specificity is the proportion of cases correctly identified as having no indicator present.

Using can mislead. For example, suppose the prevalence of the indicator is 10% in a sample of 1000 records, the sensitivity of the record abstraction is 75% (75 correct of 100 . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?