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National hospitals record, from the beginning of the 1990's, by Ministerial directives, the so-called Minimum Basic Data Set (MBDS) of each patient seen in each hospital in the country, particularly public hospitals. In the last few years, besides conventional hospital stay periods, episodes in Ambulatory Surgery, and more recently, those of Day Hospitals are also recorded.
The MBDS contains very valuable information to find out the real health of a population, since besides collecting normal demographic data (age, sex, residence), it records the diagnosis that was the reason for admission (principal diagnosis), risk factors, comorbidities and complications that the patient has during the admission (secondary diagnoses), some relevant diagnostic techniques and therapeutic interventions, particularly operations, that have been used to treat the patient (the procedures). Finally the MBDS contains the patient admission and discharge date, as well as the patient circumstances on admission (urgent, scheduled) and at discharge (discharge to home, death, transferred to another hospital, etc...).
The diagnoses and procedures collected are coded according to the International Disease Classification, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM. This coding finally permits the grouping of the different health care episodes seen by a hospital into Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG).
