Validation of an algorithm to evaluate the appropriateness of outpatient antibiotic prescribing using big data of Chinese diagnosis text.
OBJECTIVE
We aimed to evaluate the validity of an algorithm to classify diagnoses according to the appropriateness of outpatient antibiotic use in the context of Chinese free text.


SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS
A random sample of 10 000 outpatient visits was selected between January and April 2018 from a national database for monitoring rational use of drugs, which included data from 194 secondary and tertiary hospitals in China.


RESEARCH DESIGN
Diagnoses for outpatient visits were classified as tier 1 if associated with at least one condition that 'always' justified antibiotic use; as tier 2 if associated with at least one condition that only 'sometimes' justified antibiotic use but no conditions that 'always' justified antibiotic use; or as tier 3 if associated with only conditions that never justified antibiotic use, using a tier-fashion method and regular expression (RE)-based algorithm.


MEASURES
Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV) of the classification algorithm, using classification made by chart review as the standard reference, were calculated.


RESULTS
The sensitivities of the algorithm for classifying tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3 diagnoses were 98.2% (95% CI 96.4% to 99.3%), 98.4% (95% CI 97.6% to 99.1%) and 100.0% (95% CI 100.0% to 100.0%), respectively. The specificities were 100.0% (95% CI 100.0% to 100.0%), 100.0% (95% CI 99.9% to 100.0%) and 98.6% (95% CI 97.9% to 99.1%), respectively. The PPVs for classifying tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3 diagnoses were 100.0% (95% CI 99.1% to 100.0%), 99.7% (95% CI 99.2% to 99.9%) and 99.7% (95% CI 99.6% to 99.8%), respectively. The NPVs were 99.9% (95% CI 99.8% to 100.0%), 99.8% (95% CI 99.7% to 99.9%) and 100.0% (95% CI 99.8% to 100.0%), respectively.


CONCLUSIONS
The RE-based classification algorithm in the context of Chinese free text had sufficiently high validity for further evaluating the appropriateness of outpatient antibiotic prescribing.