Witham Miles D, Frost Helen, McMurdo Marion, Donnan Peter T, McGilchrist Mark
Medical Research Institute, University of Dundee , Dundee , UK .
Inform Health Soc Care. 2015;40(3):229-39. doi: 10.3109/17538157.2014.892491. Epub 2014 Mar 20.
Combining routinely collected health and social care data on older people is essential to advance both service delivery and research for this client group. Little data is available on how to combine health and social care data; this article provides an overview of a successful data linkage process and discusses potential barriers to executing such projects.
We successfully obtained and linked data on older people within Dundee from three sources: Dundee Social Work Department database (30,000 individuals aged 65 years and over), healthcare data held on NHS Tayside patients by the Health Informatics Centre (400,000 individuals), Dundee, and the Dundee of Medicine for the Elderly rehabilitation database (4300 individuals). Data were linked, anonymized and transferred to a Safe Haven environment to ensuring confidentiality and strict access control. Challenges were faced around workflows, culture and documentation. Exploiting the resultant data set raises further challenges centered on database documentation, understanding the way data were collected, dealing with missing data, data validity and collection at different time periods.
Routinely collected health and social care data sets can be linked, but significant process barriers must be overcome to allow successful linkage and integration of data and its full exploitation.
整合老年人常规收集的健康和社会护理数据对于改善该客户群体的服务提供和研究至关重要。关于如何整合健康和社会护理数据的可用数据很少；本文概述了一个成功的数据链接过程，并讨论了执行此类项目的潜在障碍。
我们成功地从三个来源获取并链接了邓迪市老年人的数据：邓迪社会工作部数据库（30000名65岁及以上的个体）、健康信息中心持有的泰赛德国民保健服务患者的医疗保健数据（400000名个体）、邓迪以及邓迪老年医学康复数据库（4300名个体）。数据被链接、匿名化并转移到安全港环境中，以确保保密性和严格的访问控制。在工作流程、文化和文档方面面临挑战。利用所得数据集引发了进一步的挑战，这些挑战集中在数据库文档、理解数据收集方式、处理缺失数据、数据有效性以及不同时间段的数据收集上。
常规收集的健康和社会护理数据集可以链接，但必须克服重大的流程障碍，才能实现数据的成功链接和整合及其充分利用。
