Addressing the challenges of cross-jurisdictional data linkage between a national clinical quality registry and government-held health data.

CONCLUSION: To our knowledge, this is the first time in Australia that person-level data from a clinical quality registry has been linked to hospital and mortality data across multiple Australian jurisdictions.
IMPLICATIONS FOR PUBLIC HEALTH: The administrative load of obtaining linked data makes projects such as this burdensome but not impossible. An improved national centralised strategy for data linkage in Australia is urgently needed.
PMID: 27625174 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Source: Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health - September 12, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Andrew NE, Sundararajan V, Thrift AG, Kilkenny MF, Katzenellenbogen J, Flack F, Gattellari M, Boyd JH, Anderson P, Grabsch B, Lannin NA, Johnston T, Chen Y, Cadilhac DA Tags: Aust N Z J Public Health Source Type: research