Hospital and residential aged care data link in WA
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) has released ‘Comparing name-based and event-based strategies for data linkage: a study linking hospital and residential aged care data for Western Australia’.
In a feasibility study carried out in 2001 and 2002, the AIHW developed a strategy for linking the hospital morbidity and residential aged care databases using date of birth, sex, region of usual residence and event dates.
Doubts concerning the efficacy of the linkage strategy were raised at the time because of the lack of either a name or a common person identifier on the two datasets.
However, this study has refined the event-based strategy, and confirmed its utility by comparing it directly with a name based linkage strategy.
The interface between acute hospital care and residential aged care has long been recognised as an important issue in aged care services research.
