Abstract
Background
Adenoma detection rate (ADR) is the colonoscopy quality metric with the strongest association to interval or “missed” cancer. Accurate measurement of ADR can be laborious and costly.
Aims
Our aim was to determine if administrative procedure codes for colonoscopy and text searches of pathology results for adenoma mentions could estimate ADR.
Methods
We identified US Veterans with a colonoscopy using Current Procedure Terminology (CPT) codes between January 2013 and December 2016 at ten Veterans Affairs sites. We applied simple text searches using Microsoft SQL Server full-text searches to query all pathology notes for “adenoma(s)” or “adenomatous” text mentions to calculate ADRs. To validate our identification of colonoscopy procedures, endoscopists of record, and adenoma detection from the electronic health record, we manually reviewed a random sample of 2000 procedure and pathology notes from the 10 sites.
Results
Structured data fields were accurate in identification of colonoscopies being performed (PPV = 0.99; 95% CI 0.99–1.00) and identifying the endoscopist of record (PPV of 0.95; 95% CI 0.94–0.96) for ADR measurement. Simple text searches of pathology notes for adenoma mentions had excellent performance statistics as follows: sensitivity 0.99 (95% CI 0.98–1.00), specificity 0.93 (95% CI 0.92–0.95), NPV 0.99 (95% CI 0.98–1.00), and PPV 0.93 (0.91–0.94) for measurement of ADR. There was no clinically significant difference in the estimates of overall ADR vs. screening ADR (p > 0.05).
Conclusions
Measuring ADR using administrative codes and text searches from pathology results is an efficient method to broadly survey colonoscopy quality.


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Abbreviations
- CRC:
-
Colorectal cancer
- ADR:
-
Adenoma detection rate
- VA:
-
Veterans affairs
- NLP:
-
Natural language processing
- EHR:
-
Electronic health record
- CDW:
-
Corporate data warehouse
- CPT:
-
Current procedure terminology
- ICD:
-
International classification of disease
- PPV:
-
Positive predictive value
- NPV:
-
Negative predictive value
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Acknowledgment
The contents of this work do not represent the views of the Department of Veterans Affairs or the United States Government.
Funding
This work was partially supported by the following: T. Kaltenbach and A. Gawron: Department of Veterans Affairs Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (Measurement Science QUERI (15-283), Project PI: Tonya Kaltenbach). A. Gawron and P. Lawrence: Salt Lake City Specialty Care Center of Innovation (Regional Director Grant Cannon). A. Gawron: Salt Lake City IDEAS COIN which is funded by Department of Veterans Affairs HSR&D Grant I50HX001240.
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AJG: planning study design, collection and interpretation of data, manual chart review, data analysis, drafting and revising the manuscript. YY: data management, collection and interpretation of data, manual chart review, data analysis. SG: planning study design, interpretation of data, drafting and revising the manuscript. GC: data management, manual chart review, collection and interpretation of data, data analysis. MW: planning study, drafting and revising the manuscript. JAD: planning study design, interpretation of data, drafting and revising the manuscript. TK: planning study design, collection and interpretation of data, manual chart review, data analysis, drafting and revising the manuscript.
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Gawron, A.J., Yao, Y., Gupta, S. et al. Simplifying Measurement of Adenoma Detection Rates for Colonoscopy. Dig Dis Sci 66, 3149–3155 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10620-020-06627-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10620-020-06627-2