Herings R M, Stricker B H, Bakker A
Rijksuniversiteit, afd. Farmaco-epidemiologie, Utrecht.
Ned Tijdschr Geneeskd. 1990 Sep 29;134(39):1903-7.
The feasibility has been studied of linking pharmacy-based dispensing data and hospital-based morbidity data by using as a linkage key a combination of gender and birth date of the patient and of his general practitioner (GP) code. Firstly, the records of one pharmacy (14,686 patients) and those of one hospital (8475 admissions in 1987) were linked on the basis of date of birth and gender. This resulted in 3,715 matching record pairs. To a random sample of 1,713 of these pairs the GP code was added. Subsequently these pairs were validated by reference to the original medical and pharmaceutical records with a procedure that guaranteed that only the name and address of the patients could be compared without having access to the clinical or pharmaceutical record of an individual. We were able to link records with a sensitivity of 91.4% (95%-confidence interval: 88.8-94.0) and a specificity of 96.0% (95%-confidence interval: 94.5-97.5). In conclusion, probabilistic linkage of pharmaceutical and medical data with the combination of gender, date of birth and GP code facilitates successful record linkage.
通过使用患者及其全科医生（GP）代码的性别和出生日期组合作为链接键，研究了将基于药房的配药数据与基于医院的发病数据相链接的可行性。首先，根据出生日期和性别，将一家药房的记录（14,686名患者）与一家医院的记录（1987年的8475次入院记录）进行链接。这产生了3715对匹配记录。在这些配对中的1713对随机样本中添加了GP代码。随后，通过参考原始医疗和药学记录对这些配对进行验证，该程序确保只能比较患者的姓名和地址，而无法获取个人的临床或药学记录。我们能够以91.4%的灵敏度（95%置信区间：88.8 - 94.0）和96.0%的特异性（95%置信区间：94.5 - 97.5）链接记录。总之，将药学和医学数据与性别、出生日期和GP代码相结合的概率性链接有助于成功进行记录链接。
