PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Paul Russell AU - Sube Banerjee AU - Jen Watt AU - Rosalyn Adleman AU - Belinda Agoe AU - Nerida Burnie AU - Alex Carefull AU - Kiran Chandan AU - Dominie Constable AU - Mark Daniels AU - David Davies AU - Sid Deshmukh AU - Martin Huddart AU - Ashrafi Jabin AU - Penelope Jarrett AU - Jenifer King AU - Tamar Koch AU - Sanjoy Kumar AU - Stavroula Lees AU - Sinan Mir AU - Dominic Naidoo AU - Sylvia Nyame AU - Ryuichiro Sasae AU - Tushar Sharma AU - Clare Thormod AU - Krish Vedavanam AU - Anja Wilton AU - Breda Flaherty TI - Improving the identification of people with dementia in primary care: evaluation of the impact of primary care dementia coding guidance on identified prevalence AID - 10.1136/bmjopen-2013-004023 DP - 2013 Dec 01 TA - BMJ Open PG - e004023 VI - 3 IP - 12 4099 - http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/12/e004023.short 4100 - http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/12/e004023.full SO - BMJ Open2013 Dec 01; 3 AB - Objective Improving dementia care is a policy priority nationally and internationally; there is a ‘diagnosis gap’ with less than half of the cases of dementia ever diagnosed. The English Health Department's Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) encourages primary care recognition and recording of dementia. The codes for dementia are complex with the possibility of underidentification through miscoding. We developed guidance on coding of dementia; we report the impact of applying this to ‘clean up’ dementia coding and records at a practice level. Design The guidance had five elements: (1) identify Read Codes for dementia; (2) access QOF dementia register; (3) generate lists of patients who may have dementia; (4) compare search with QOF data and (5) review cases. In each practice, one general practitioner conducted the exercise. The number of dementia QOF registers before and after the exercise was recorded with the hours taken to complete the exercise. Setting London primary care. Participants 23 (85%) of 27 practices participated, covering 79 312 (19 562 over 65 s) participants. Outcomes The number on dementia QOF registers; time taken. Results The number of people with dementia on QOF registers increased from 1007 to 1139 (χ2=8.17, p=0.004), raising identification rates by 8.8%. It took 4.7 h per practice, on an average. Conclusions These data demonstrate the potential of a simple primary care coding exercise, requiring no specific training, to increase the dementia identification rate. An improvement of 8.8% between 2011 and 2012 is equivalent to that of the fourth most improved primary care trust in the UK. In absolute terms, if this effects were mirrored across the UK primary care, the number of cases with dementia identified would rise by over 70 000 from 364 329 to 434 488 raising the recognition rate from 46% to 54.8%. Implementing this exercise appears to be a simple and effective way to improve recognition rates in primary care.