Chair: Prof Karen Bloor, Professor of Health Economics and Policy, Department of Health Sciences, University of York

Code Set Selection Methods for Primary Care Data

Speaker – Richard Williams, University of Manchester

Most primary care health data is ‘coded’ – meaning, instead of a patient’s record containing the term “type 2 diabetes“, it would contain the clinical code “C10F”. When we want to analyse patient data we must first make sets of these clinical codes, called ‘code sets’, to describe what we want to find out.

However, caution must be exercised as the process of creating these code sets is non-trivial, and mistakes at this early stage of the analysis pipeline have been shown to lead different research teams to reach different results and conclusions from the same data source. In this talk, Richard will provide an introduction to the various coding systems in use in UK primary care, talk about the right ways to create clinical code sets, and signpost attendees to various online resources that can help.