Record linkage applications in health services research: opportunities and challenges

When aggregating medical data for research, it is necessary to link data on the same person, but from different sources. Linking enables a researcher to conduct longitudinal studies. Typically such linking can be accomplished by using personal identifying information, such as names, birthdates, addresses, and national or local identifying codes, though occasionally this method does not work because of incompleteness or inaccuracies in the data. For research, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy rules severely restrict researcher access to identifiers. Therefore, an important research problem is how to link data from a geographic region whose data sources have significant overlap in the actual patients included. In this talk, I describe various challenges and opportunities that exist while tackling this problem.