Hospital Discharge Codes and Overestimating Severe Maternal Morbidity During Delivery Hospitalization

( Obstet Gynecol. 2024;143(4):582–584. doi: 10.1097/AOG.0000000000005537) Administrative data play a crucial role in understanding severe maternal morbidity (SMM) events, yet their interpretation heavily relies on coding quality. Overestimation of SMM during birth hospitalizations might occur due to International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10) codes being carried forward from predelivery events. This study aimed to describe SMM distribution across the antepartum, birth, and postpartum periods and to assess the potential false discovery rate of SMM events, hypothesizing that some events are subject to carry-forward coding. Following IRB approval and data-use agreements, a shared, deidentified database was created using the PCORnet Common Data Model at the University of North Carolina and Duke University.