Assessing the Diagnostic Accuracy of Physicians for Home Death Certification in Shanghai: Application of SmartVA

Bibliographic Details
Title: Assessing the Diagnostic Accuracy of Physicians for Home Death Certification in Shanghai: Application of SmartVA
Authors: Lei Chen, Tian Xia, Rasika Rampatige, Hang Li, Tim Adair, Rohina Joshi, Zhen Gu, Huiting Yu, Bo Fang, Deirdre McLaughlin, Alan D. Lopez, Chunfang Wang, Zheng'an Yuan
Source: Frontiers in Public Health, Vol 10 (2022)
Publisher Information: Frontiers Media S.A., 2022.
Publication Year: 2022
Collection: LCC:Public aspects of medicine
Subject Terms: Smart Verbal Autopsy, cause of death, CRVS system, demography, epidemiology, Public aspects of medicine, RA1-1270
More Details: Approximately 30% of deaths in Shanghai either occur at home or are not medically attended. The recorded cause of death (COD) in these cases may not be reliable. We applied the Smart Verbal Autopsy (VA) tool to assign the COD for a representative sample of home deaths certified by 16 community health centers (CHCs) from three districts in Shanghai, from December 2017 to June 2018. The results were compared with diagnoses from routine practice to ascertain the added value of using SmartVA. Overall, cause-specific mortality fraction (CSMF) accuracy improved from 0.93 (93%) to 0.96 after the application of SmartVA. A comparison with a “gold standard (GS)” diagnoses obtained from a parallel medical record review investigation found that 86.3% of the initial diagnoses made by the CHCs were assigned the correct COD, increasing to 90.5% after the application of SmartVA. We conclude that routine application of SmartVA is not indicated for general use in CHCs, although the tool did improve diagnostic accuracy for residual causes, such as other or ill-defined cancers and non-communicable diseases.
Document Type: article
File Description: electronic resource
Language: English
ISSN: 2296-2565
Relation: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2022.842880/full; https://doaj.org/toc/2296-2565
DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.842880
Access URL: https://doaj.org/article/dc75f00fb88746c3b08c6caff095d32d
Accession Number: edsdoj.75f00fb88746c3b08c6caff095d32d
Database: Directory of Open Access Journals
More Details
ISSN:22962565
DOI:10.3389/fpubh.2022.842880
Published in:Frontiers in Public Health
Language:English