Abstract
Introduction
There is currently an increased demand for elective orthopaedic surgery. However, due to financial, time and resource limitations, there is a pressing need to identify those who would benefit most with the lowest risk of complications. Comorbidities play a fundamental part in this decision and the traditional way to ascertain this is through medical record data ion during pre-operative assessment, but this can be time-consuming and expensive. We therefore set out to establish whether patient self-reported comorbidities are reliable as a principal source of information.
Method
Searches of PubMed and Medline were performed by two independent researchers. Inclusion criteria were any published study assessing the reliability of at least one patient reported comorbidity against their medical record or clinical assessment as gold standard.
Results
There were 27 studies included 12 concluded with unreliability, 11 with reliability, 4 inconclusive. Factors found to affect the concordance included gender, age, ethnicity, level of education, living alone, marital status, number or severity of comorbidities and depression.
Conclusions
The majority of studies concluded that patient self-reported comorbidities are unreliable, even when their results showed good concordance. Although patient reported data is useful, it is not reliable enough to be used as a standalone measure.
Erratum to: P89 Patient reported comorbidity is not a reliable data source: a systematic review of the literature
