The Classification of Hospital-Acquired Diagnoses (CHADx) is intended to enable routinely coded inpatient data to be used to monitor a range of hospital- acquired diagnoses (“complications”), and support quality improvement efforts by hospital-based clinical teams. Data on patient safety performance is an important tool for reducing the rate of hospital-acquired illness and injury.
The CHADx (pronounced “chaddix”) is applied to the International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision, Australian modification (ICD-10-AM). The CHADx classification groups over 4,500 ICD-10-AM codes into a manageable hierarchy of 17 classes and 145 sub-classes to characterise hospital acquired complications. Examples include:
- Post-procedural complications
- Adverse drug events
- Accidental injuries
- Specific infections
- Metabolic disorders
ICD-10-AM codes are allocated for every hospital patient separation in Australia. Codes are assigned for both the principal reason for admission, for injuries, procedures, events and for co-morbidities. The occurrence of a hospital acquired diagnosis is identified by applying the condition-onset flag to a given diagnosis or injury code. CHADx potentially allows hospitals to identify, count and track adverse events using the codes recorded for each separation.
The CHADx was developed by researchers at the Australian Centre for Economic Research on Health at the University of Queensland, with funding from the Commission. During 2010-2011, the Commission engaged a Health Information Manager with expertise in ICD-10 to map the classification to CD-10-AM Seventh Edition, and to review and refine the counting rules associated with allocating diagnoses to a CHADx class.
The expanded list of the CHADx classification (Excel 257 KB)
A series of publications related to the CHADx classification (PDF 19 KB) now exists on the use of CHADx.
Help with accessing large documents
When accessing large documents (over 500 KB in size), it is recommended that the following procedure be used:
- Click the link with the RIGHT mouse button
- Choose "Save Target As.../Save Link As..." depending on your browser
- Select an appropriate folder on a local drive to place the downloaded file
Attempting to open large documents within the browser window (by left-clicking)
may inhibit your ability to continue browsing while the document is
opening and/or lead to system problems.
Help with accessing PDF documents
To view PDF (Portable Document Format) documents, you will need to have a PDF reader installed on your computer. A number of PDF readers are available through the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) Web Guide website.
