A study in JAMA Oncology investigated whether medical records and patient reports tended to agree on the presence or absence of comorbid conditions.
The researchers — led by Fan Ye, MD, of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — identified 881 patients who had recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer. They analyzed medical records alongside patient-reported information to determine agreement between the two records for 20 medical conditions.
In 16 of the 20 conditions, more than 90 percent of patients experienced agreement between their own reports and their medical records. The two comorbidities that experienced the lowest agreement between patient reports and medical records were hyperlipidemia and arthritis. For some conditions — such as arrhythmia and kidney disease — old age was associated with lower agreement.
"Overall, patient reporting provides information similar to medical record abstraction without significant differences by patient race or educational level," the researchers concluded.