Association for Academic Surgery Search Engines to Capture Missing Deaths From Institutional Data Warehouse

Introduction: Clinical publications use mortality as a hard end point. It is unknown how many patient deaths are under-reported in institutional databases. The objective of this study was to query mortality in our patient cohort from our data warehouse and compare these deaths to those identified in different databases. Methods: We passed the first/last name and date of birth of 134 patients through online mortality search engines (Find a Grave Index, US Cemetery and Funeral Home Collection, etc.) to assess their ability to capture patient deaths and compared that to deaths recorded from our institutional data warehouse.Results: Our institutional data warehouse found approximately one-third of the total pa-tient mortalities. After the Social Security Death Index, we found that the Find a Grave Index captured the most mortalities missed by the institutional data warehouse. These results highlight the advantages of incorporating readily available search engines into institutional data warehouses for the accurate collection of patient mortalities, particularly those that occur outside of index operative admission.Conclusions: The incorporation of the mortality search engines significantly augmented the capture of patient deaths. Our approach may be useful for tailored patient outreach and reporting mortalities with institutional data.(c) 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This study evaluated the use of online mortality search engines in capturing patient deaths compared to institutional databases. The results showed that incorporating readily available search engines significantly increased the capture of patient deaths, particularly those occurring outside of the index operative admission.