ArticleBMJ open2022
Clinical code usage in UK general practice: a cohort study exploring 18 conditions over 14 years.
Article in BMJ open, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Prevalence of Infection and Sepsis Associated Dysphagia in Hospitalised Patients: A Retrospective Cross-sectional Study.Dysphagia · 2026Article
- Quality of Cancer-Related Clinical Coding in Primary Care in North Central London: Mixed Methods Quality Improvement Project.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Article
- Socioeconomic inequalities in disease prevalence by age and sex for 17 common long-term conditions in England: retrospective, observational study of electronic primary care records from Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) Aurum.Journal of epidemiology and community health · 2025Observational
- Age-adjusted natriuretic peptide thresholds for a diagnosis of heart failure in the community: Diagnostic accuracy study.ESC heart failure · 2025Article
- Measuring Diagnostic Quality: The Capacity of Routinely Collected Data and Applications to Chronic Respiratory Disease.Pragmatic and observational research · 2025Article
- The effect of comorbidities on diagnostic interval for lung cancer in England: a cohort study using electronic health record data.British journal of cancer · 2024Article
- Machine learning identifies risk factors associated with long-term opioid use in fibromyalgia patients newly initiated on an opioid.RMD open · 2024Article
- Rates of venous thromboembolism associated with acute psychiatric admission: A retrospective cohort study.Experimental and therapeutic medicine · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveTo assess the diagnostic Read code usage for 18 conditions by examining their frequency and diversity in UK primary care between 2000 and 2013.
designPopulation-based cohort study
setting684 UK general practices contributing data to the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) GOLD.
participantsPatients with clinical codes for at least one of asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, hypertension (HT), coronary heart disease, atrial fibrillation (AF), heart failure, stroke, hypothyroidism, chronic kidney disease, learning disability (LD), depression, dementia, epilepsy, severe mental illness (SMI), osteoarthritis, osteoporosis and cancer. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: For the frequency ranking of clinical codes, canonical correlation analysis was applied to correlations of clinical code usage of 1, 3 and 5 years. Three measures of diversity (Shannon entropy index of diversity, richness and evenness) were used to quantify changes in incident and total clinical codes.
resultsOverall, all examined conditions, except LD, showed positive monotonic correlation. HT, hypothyroidism, osteoarthritis and SMI codes' usage had high 5-year correlation. The codes' usage diversity remained stable overall throughout the study period. Cancer, diabetes and SMI had the highest richness (code lists need time to define) unlike AF, hypothyroidism and LD. SMI (high richness) and hypothyroidism (low richness) can last for 5 years, whereas cancer and diabetes (high richness) and LD (low richness) only last for 2 years.
conclusionsThis is an under-reported research area and the findings suggest the codes' usage diversity for most conditions remained overall stable throughout the study period. Generated mental health code lists can last for a long time unlike cardiometabolic conditions and cancer. Adopting more consistent and less diverse coding would help improve data quality in primary care. Future research is needed following the transfer to the Systematised Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) coding.
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