Abstract

Background: Hypertensive emergency (HTNE) diagnostic code was introduced, in the US, in October 2016 to improve identification of patients with end-organ damage due to high blood pressure but its impact is unclear. Objective: To assess the accuracy of HTNE code using administrative data. Methods: We used National Inpatient Sample 2017 to identify adult patients, age ≥18 years, with International Classification of Disease-10th Clinical modification (ICD-10-CM) code of I16.1. We used the presence of end-organ damage diagnostic codes to identify true HTNE. Results: A total of 194,495 patients had a diagnosis of HTNE. Of these only 144,070 (74.1%) had a concomitant diagnosis of end-organ damage. Baseline characteristics of entire cohort stratified by presence of target organ damage (Table 1A) and frequency of end-organ damage in true HTNE patients (Table 1B) are shown. Patients with true HTNE were likely to be older and male with higher co-morbidity burden. There was also significant difference in outcomes between two groups with a higher proportion of true HTNE patients experiencing longer length of stay and increased mortality which is in-line with previous studies. Conclusions: The accuracy of hypertensive emergency diagnosis code is low with positive predictive value of 74.1% and caution is advised when using with administrative data. Further studies, using individual patient discharge records, are required to validate HTNE code.

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