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Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 4:233-237 (1997)
© 1997 American Medical Informatics Association

Implementation Brief

Use of Commercial Record Linkage Software and Vital Statistics to Identify Patient Deaths

Thomas B. Newman, MD, MPH and Andrew N. Brown, MD, MPH

Affiliations of the authors: Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics (TBN), Laboratory Medicine (TBN, ANB), and Pediatrics (TBN), School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, CA.

Correspondence to: Thomas B. Newman, MD, MPH, UCSF Box 0560, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, San Francisco, CA 94143.E-mail: newman{at}cdrp.ucsf.edu

Abstract We evaluated the ability of a microcomputer program (Automatch) to link patient records in our hospital's database (N = 253,836) with mortality files from California (N = 1,312,779) and the U.S. Social Security Administration (N = 13,341,581). We linked 96.5% of 3,448 in-hospital deaths, 99.3% for patients with social security numbers. None of 14,073 patients known to be alive (because they were subsequently admitted) was linked with California deaths, and only 6 (0.1%) of 6,444 were falsely identified as dead in the United States file. For patients with unknown vital status but items in the database likely to be associated with high 3-year mortality rates, we identified death records of 88% of 494 patients with cancer metastatic to the liver, 84% of 164 patients with pancreatic cancer, and 91% of 126 patients with CD4 counts of less than 50. Hospital data can be accurately linked with state and national vital statistics using commercial record linkage software.




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