Computers and biomedical research, an international journal
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Comput. Biomed. Res. · Aug 1998
Enhancing the power of record linkage involving low quality personal identifiers: use of the best link principle and cause of death prior likelihoods.
The Heartstart Scotland study collects details of all resuscitation attempts carried out by the Scottish Ambulance Service. The linkage between records for Heartstart study subjects who died before admission to a hospital and the national file of death records maintained by the Registrar General for Scotland is described. ⋯ In addition, although no cause of death information was recorded on the Heartstart records, a priori expectations of the distribution of causes of death among linked death records were used. Despite these enhancements, however, clerical resolution of a proportion of the potential links generated by the automatic algorithm significantly improved the accuracy of the linkage.