The Effect of Including Secondary Diagnoses on the Description of the Diagnostic Content of Family Practice

The diagnoses that physicians record are an important part of the mosaic that describes what they do. Various classifications are used to code the recorded diagnoses to permit the identification of specific conditions. The more specific the classification, the more readily this can be achieved, and for all its faults the International Classification of Diseases1 is the most widely used classification of both hospital and ambulatory diagnoses. For the purposes of describing and comparing the practices of individual or groups of physicians, it is desirable to aggregate diagnostic data in clinically meaningful ways. One dilemma facing researchers is whether to use only the primary diagnosis or to include all the diagnoses recorded for

Dilemma · Family medicine · Identification (biology) · Medical diagnosis · Pathology · Mathematics · Medical Coding and Health Information · Medicine · Primary Care and Health Outcomes

• Diagnosis Clusters

  Ronald Schneeweiss, Roger A Rosenblatt et al.•Medical Care•1983

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