Condition-Specific Criteria

Ambiguous chest pain codes were often excluded to avoid weakening the cohort definition. The suicidality cohort was renamed to include intentional self-harm because administrative data often lacked reliable intent information. For pneumonia, rare etiologies were excluded because they were likely anomalies or clinically distinct from typical ED pneumonia encounters. For chest pain, common codes such as unspecified chest pain were supported because they capture many ED presentations. The COPD definition favored inclusiveness because ED documentation often uses bronchitis, emphysema, and COPD terms interchangeably.