Empowering Patient Risk Management Strategies: Validation the AHRQ Elixhauser Mortality Index on Italian Hospital Administrative Dataset

The study of patients' comorbidities is a fundamental element in risk analyses or quality assessment of health care systems. In addition to Charlson's index, which is the most widely used in the literature, there is Elixhauser's index, which analyses the comorbidities of patients in the administrative flow by identifying 29 categories, thus being more accurate and precise. The aim of this work was to validate the use of the Elixhauser measure and the AHRQ Elixhauser Mortality Index to estimate in-hospital mortality within the AORN 'A. Cardarelli' hospital in southern Italy. To do this, it was first necessary to create a special Python script for the identification of Elixhauser classes. From the classes, it was possible to obtain the index, which was then investigated through the implementation of logistic regression. The c-statistic of the index was 0.626, slightly lower than the mortality predicted with the extended version of the Elixhouser of 0.666, but still lower than the validation results available in the literature for other contexts.