Evaluation of record linkage of two large administrative databases in a middle income country: stillbirths and notifications of dengue during pregnancy in Brazil.
Background: Due to the increasing availability of individual-level information across different electronic datasets, record linkage has become an efficient and important research tool. High quality linkage is essential for producing robust results. The objective of this study was to describe the pro...
| Publicado en: | BMC Medical Informatics & Decision Making Vol. 17; pp. 1 - 10 |
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| Autores principales: | , , , , , , , |
| Formato: | research Journal Article |
| Publicado: |
BioMed Central
7/17/2017
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ccm&AN=124197600&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ccm uiTerm: 124197600 longDbName: CINAHL Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: dissinfo: jinfo: jid: 14726947 1CI0 jtl: BMC Medical Informatics & Decision Making issn: 14726947 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: 7/17/2017 vid: 17 pid: 24147 pub: BioMed Central artinfo: ui: 124197600 124197600 NLM28716074 124197600 10.1186/s12911-017-0506-5 NLM28716074 124197600 ppf: 1 ppct: 9 formats: tig: atl: Evaluation of record linkage of two large administrative databases in a middle income country: stillbirths and notifications of dengue during pregnancy in Brazil. aug: au: Paixão, Enny S. Harron, Katie Andrade, Kleydson Teixeira, Maria Glória Fiaccone, Rosemeire L. da Conceição N. Costa, Maria Rodrigues, Laura C. Costa, Maria da Conceição N affil: London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Keppel St, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HT, UK sug: subj: Pregnancy Complications, Infectious Epidemiology Medical Record Linkage Standards Dengue Epidemiology Perinatal Death Epidemiology Brazil Pregnancy Human Female Relative Risk Validation Studies Comparative Studies Evaluation Research Multicenter Studies Female ab: Background: Due to the increasing availability of individual-level information across different electronic datasets, record linkage has become an efficient and important research tool. High quality linkage is essential for producing robust results. The objective of this study was to describe the process of preparing and linking national Brazilian datasets, and to compare the accuracy of different linkage methods for assessing the risk of stillbirth due to dengue in pregnancy.Methods: We linked mothers and stillbirths in two routinely collected datasets from Brazil for 2009-2010: for dengue in pregnancy, notifications of infectious diseases (SINAN); for stillbirths, mortality (SIM). Since there was no unique identifier, we used probabilistic linkage based on maternal name, age and municipality. We compared two probabilistic approaches, each with two thresholds: 1) a bespoke linkage algorithm; 2) a standard linkage software widely used in Brazil (ReclinkIII), and used manual review to identify further links. Sensitivity and positive predictive value (PPV) were estimated using a subset of gold-standard data created through manual review. We examined the characteristics of false-matches and missed-matches to identify any sources of bias.Results: From records of 678,999 dengue cases and 62,373 stillbirths, the gold-standard linkage identified 191 cases. The bespoke linkage algorithm with a conservative threshold produced 131 links, with sensitivity = 64.4% (68 missed-matches) and PPV = 92.5% (8 false-matches). Manual review of uncertain links identified an additional 37 links, increasing sensitivity to 83.7%. The bespoke algorithm with a relaxed threshold identified 132 true matches (sensitivity = 69.1%), but introduced 61 false-matches (PPV = 68.4%). ReclinkIII produced lower sensitivity and PPV than the bespoke linkage algorithm. Linkage error was not associated with any recorded study variables.Conclusion: Despite a lack of unique identifiers for linking mothers and stillbirths, we demonstrate a high standard of linkage of large routine databases from a middle income country. Probabilistic linkage and manual review were essential for accurately identifying cases for a case-control study, but this approach may not be feasible for larger databases or for linkage of more common outcomes. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: research Journal Article ougenre: Article language: English refInfo: holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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