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. 2020 Apr;141(4):385-395.
doi: 10.1111/acps.13143. Epub 2020 Jan 26.

Concordance between health administrative data and survey-derived diagnoses for mood and anxiety disorders

J Edwards  1   2 , A Thind  1   3   4 , S Stranges  1   4   5 , M Chiu  6   7 , K K Anderson  1   2   8
Affiliations

Concordance between health administrative data and survey-derived diagnoses for mood and anxiety disorders

J Edwards et al. Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2020 Apr.

Abstract

Objective: To assess whether estimates of survey structured interview diagnoses of mood and anxiety disorders were concordant with diagnoses of these disorders obtained from health administrative data.

Methods: All Ontario respondents to the 2012 Canadian Community Health Survey-Mental Health (CCHS-MH) were linked to health administrative databases at ICES (formerly known as the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences). Survey structured interview diagnoses were compared with health administrative data diagnoses obtained using a standardized algorithm. We used modified Poisson regression analyses to assess whether socio-demographic factors were associated with concordance between the two measures.

Results: Of the 4157 Ontarians included in our sample, 20.4% had either a structured interview diagnosis (13.9%) or health administrative diagnosis (10.4%) of a mood or anxiety disorder. There was high discordance between measures, with only 19.4% agreement. Migrant status, age, employment, and income were associated with discordance between measures.

Conclusions: Our findings indicate that previous estimates of the 12-month prevalence of mood and anxiety disorders in Ontario may be underestimating the true prevalence, and that population-based surveys and health administrative data may be capturing different groups of people. Understanding the limitations of data commonly used in epidemiologic studies is a key foundation for improving population-based estimates of mental disorders.

Keywords: anxiety; depression; epidemiology; health service; population surveys.

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