National Documentation and Coding Practices of Noncompliance: The Importance of Social Determinants of Health and the Stigma of African-American Bias

Abstract

Patient records serve many purposes, one of which includes monitoring the quality of care provided that they can be analyzed through coding and documentation. Z-codes can provide additional information beyond a specific clinical disorder that may still warrant treatment. Social Determinants of Health have specific Z-codes that may help clinicians address social factors that may contribute to patients’ health care outcomes. However, there are Z-codes that specify patient noncompliance which has a pejorative connotation that may stigmatize patients and prevent clinicians from examining nonadherence from a social determinant of health perspective. A retrospective cross-sectional study was performed to examine the associations of patient and encounter characteristics with the coding of patient noncompliance. Included in the study were all patients >18 years of age who were admitted to hospitals participating in the Vizient Clinical Data Base (CDB) between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2019. Almost 9 million US inpatients were included in the study. Of those, 6.3% had a noncompliance Z-code. Use of noncompliance Z-codes was associated with the following odds estimate ratio in decreasing order: the presence of a social determinant of health (odds ratio [OR], 4.817), African American race (OR, 2.010), Medicaid insurance (OR, 1.707), >3 chronic medical conditions (OR, 1.546), living in an economically distressed community (OR, 1.320), male gender (OR, 1.313), nonelective admission status (OR, 1.245), age <65 years (OR, 1.234). More than 1 in 15 patient hospitalizations had a noncompliance code. Factors associated with these codes are difficult, if not impossible, for patients to modify. Disproportionate representation of Africa-Americans among hospitalizations with noncompliance coding is concerning and urgently deserves further exploration to determine the degree to which it may be a product of clinician bias, especially if the term noncompliance prevents health care providers from looking into socioeconomic factors that may contribute to patient nonadherence.