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Abstract
The Victorian Perinatal Data Collection Unit (PDCU) maintains a Birth Defects Register (BDR), including data on terminations of pregnancy for birth defects before 20 weeks. This study aimed to validate the completeness of reporting, and accuracy of diagnoses provided by hospitals on these terminations.

From 1995-1999, 13 hospitals notified 321 terminations to the PDCU. An additional 41 cases were found through this study. For matched cases (n=273), 199 (73%) had comparable diagnoses, 21 (8%) had different and 53 (19%) had additional diagnoses. Discrepancies arose because of problems with correct identification of relevant cases and lack of understanding of the importance of including all information on multiple birth defects.

Abstract
Hospital discharge data from Maryland in the United States have many more diagnosis and procedure codes compared with coded data from Australia. In order to investigate the source of these additional codes, we analysed 4000 records from each country. There were few differences in the two samples for age, sex or number of deaths. For procedures, an important source of difference was that Maryland coders used many more diagnostic and non-surgical codes compared with Australian coders. Despite significant differences for many of the disease categories, it was not possible to learn many lessons from the Maryland data because nearly half of these codes were not related to the categories we selected for the study. For diagnoses, further work is needed to understand the differences in the number of codes used in the two countries.