A Comparison of Probabilistic and Deterministic Match Strategies for Linking Prehospital and in-Hospital Stroke Registry Data

Understanding and improving EMS stroke care requires linking data from both the prehospital and hospital settings. In the US, such data is collected in separate de-identified registries that cannot be directly linked due to lack of a common, unique patient identifier. In the absence of unique patient identifiers two common approaches to linking databases are deterministic matching, which uses combinations of non-unique matching variables to define matches, and probabilistic matching, which generates estimates of match probability based on the degree of similarity between records.
Source: Journal of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Diseases - Category: Neurology Authors: Source Type: research