Linkage of patient records from disparate sources.

We review ideas, approaches and progress in the field of record linkage. We point out that the latent class models used in probabilistic matching have been well developed and applied in a different context of diagnostic testing when the true disease status is unknown. The methodology developed in the diagnostic testing setting can be potentially translated and applied in record linkage. Although there are many methods for record linkage, a comprehensive evaluation of methods for a wide range of real-world data with different data characteristics and with true match status is absent due to lack of data sharing. However, the recent availability of generators of synthetic data with realistic characteristics renders such evaluations feasible.