A Case Study of the Impact of Inaccurate Cause-of-Death Reporting on Health Disparity Tracking
New York City Premature Cardiovascular Mortality
Bibliographic Data
Objectives. Heart disease death overreporting is problematic in New York City (NYC) and other US jurisdictions. We examined whether overreporting affects the premature ( Methods. We identified overreporting hospitals and used counts of premature heart disease deaths at reference hospitals to estimate corrected counts. We then corrected citywide, age-adjusted premature heart disease death rates among Blacks and Whites and a White–Black premature heart disease death disparity. Results. At overreporting hospitals, 51% of the decedents were White compared with 25% at reference hospitals. Correcting the heart disease death counts at overreporting hospitals decreased the age-adjusted premature heart disease death rate 10.1% (from 41.5 to 37.3 per 100 000) among Whites compared with 4.2% (from 66.2 to 63.4 per 100 000) among Blacks. Correction increased the White–Black disparity 6.1% (from 24.6 to 26.1 per 100 000). Conclusions. In 2008, NYC’s White–Black premature heart disease death disparity was underestimated because of overreporting by hospitals serving larger proportions of Whites. Efforts to reduce overreporting may increase the observed disparity, potentially obscuring any programmatic or policy-driven advances
Cause of death · Disease · Environmental health · Heart disease · Life expectancy · Mortality rate · Population · Years of potential life lost · Autopsy Techniques and Outcomes · Census and Population Estimation · Demography · Global Cancer Incidence and Screening · Internal Medicine · Medicine · Gerontology
| Citations per year | 0.18 |
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| Citation span | 2015 - 2019 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |