Accuracy of discharge diagnosis codes in estimating true sepsis burden in NSW, Australia

The medical charts of the selected patients will be reviewed by a member of the research team at 96 hours after admission to apply clinical sepsis-3 criteria and at day 60 after admission to collect discharge diagnosis data. Hospitalization cases will be classified as clinical sepsis if they meet the gold standard clinical diagnosis via SEPSIS-3 criteria. The two ICD coding methods (IHME and Angus) will be compared with the gold standard clinical definition using Sepsis-3 criteria to measure their accuracy in sepsis diagnosis. IHME is the newly proposed set of ICD codes by Global Burden of Disease group while Angus is the most commonly used ICD coding method for sepsis. Their details are mentioned in the protocols as appendices. Both these methods will be compared to clinical sepsis diagnosis (sepsis-3) criteria as gold standard. All enrolled patients will be assessed till 60 days after their admission.