Summary
Background: To follow up populations exposed to several radiation accidents in the Southern Urals,
a cause-of-death registry was established at the Urals Center capturing deaths in
the Chelyabinsk, Kurgan and Sverdlovsk region since 1950.
Objectives: When registering deaths over such a long time period, quality measures need to be
in place to maintain quality and reduce the impact of individual coders as well as
quality changes in death certificates.
Methods: To ensure the uniformity of coding, a method for semi-automatic coding was developed,
which is described here. Briefly, the method is based on a dynamic thesaurus, database-supported
coding and parallel coding by two different individuals.
Results: A comparison of the proposed method for organizing the coding process with the common
procedure of coding showed good agreement, with, at the end of the coding process,
70 – 90% agreement for the three-digit ICD -9 rubrics.
Conclusions: The semi-automatic method ensures a sufficiently high quality of coding by at the
same time providing an opportunity to reduce the labor intensity inherent in the creation
of large-volume cause-of-death registries.
Keywords
Mortality register - cause of death - International Classification of Diseases (ICD)
- radiation - Russia
