Coding errors in prehospital medical records can have a significant impact on healthcare quality and can impede efficient continuity of care. The prevalence of adverse events in the EMS setting among patients suffering from life-threatening conditions is higher compared with lower-acuity patients and is associated with deviations from clinical protocols and missing or incomplete EMS documentation. 

We reviewed PCRs submitted with the wrong hospital code after patient care transfer, used Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to identify the sources of the coding error and identified inconsistent mapping of hospital codes. We achieved a 50% reduction in coding errors after correcting the mapping hospital codes.