DeZorzi, Girotra Earn Top Poster Prize in Munich

Third-year resident Dr. Chris DeZorzi will bring a best poster award back across the Atlantic Ocean this week. Dr. DeZorzi accompanied Dr. Saket Girotra, Assistant Professor in Cardiovascular Medicine, to Munich, Germany, for the European Society of Cardiology meeting, the largest gathering of cardiologists in the world. As first author on their abstract, “Validity of Administrative Billing Codes for Identifying Patients with Cardiac Arrest,” Dr. DeZorzi presented his and his colleagues’ work to the poster judges.

Their work focused on determining whether using ICD-9 billing codes to study patterns of care and clinical outcomes could have a positive predictive value for identifying true cases of cardiac arrest. After an extensive chart review by multiple independent reviewers looking for patients who did not have an arrest either in or out of hospital but were nonetheless coded as such, they found that only about 40% of cases were correctly labeled. Dr. DeZorzi and his colleagues’ results show that reliable resuscitation research showing high survival rates should not rest solely on administrative billing code data.

Congratulations to Dr. DeZorzi, senior author Dr. Girotra, and the other contributors—Drs. Brenden Boyle, Haseeb Qazi, Rohan Khera, Mary Sarrazin, and Paul Chan—on their success!