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Evaluation of identifier field agreement in linked neonatal records

Journal of Perinatology volume 37, pages 969–974 (2017)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

Objective:

To better address barriers arising from missing and unreliable identifiers in neonatal medical records, we evaluated agreement and discordance among traditional and non-traditional linkage fields within a linked neonatal data set.

Study Design:

The retrospective, descriptive analysis represents infants born from 2013 to 2015. We linked children’s hospital neonatal physician billing records to newborn medical records originating from an academic delivery hospital and evaluated rates of agreement, discordance and missingness for a set of 12 identifier field pairs used in the linkage algorithm.

Results:

We linked 7293 of 7404 physician billing records (98.5%), all of which were deemed valid upon manual review. Linked records contained a mean of 9.1 matching and 1.6 non-matching identifier pairs. Only 4.8% had complete agreement among all 12 identifier pairs.

Conclusion:

Our approach to selection of linkage variables and data formatting preparatory to linkage have generalizability, which may inform future neonatal and perinatal record linkage efforts.

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Acknowledgements

DISCLAIMER

The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

This work was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health through the Center for Clinical and Translational Science and Training at the University of Cincinnati (5UL1TR001425-02) and the Cincinnati Children’s Research Foundation Academic and Research Committee.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Perinatal Institute, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, USA

    E S Hall & J M Greenberg

  2. Department of Biomedical Informatics, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, USA

    E S Hall & K Marsolo

Authors
  1. E S Hall
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  2. K Marsolo
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  3. J M Greenberg
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Correspondence to E S Hall.

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Hall, E., Marsolo, K. & Greenberg, J. Evaluation of identifier field agreement in linked neonatal records. J Perinatol 37, 969–974 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/jp.2017.70

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