It is based on systematic, validated record linkage of inpatient, death certificate and primary care data to identify all admissions and all deaths that occur following discharge from hospital as well as those that occur in hospital.
The long-term mortality outcome status was obtained through linkage of the Death Registration Database maintained by Alberta Vital Statistics and the Alberta Health and Wellness registry.
MZ conceived the additional linkage of unlinked deaths and the use of splines with ICD coding parameter in the Poisson regression model for the analysis of time trends, and finalized the manuscript.
To insure the completeness of registration, more comprehensive solutions involve data linkage of cause of death registers with medical birth registers or birth registration records (Denmark, England and Wales, Finland, Norway and Slovenia), abortion records (Finland) and hospital records (Denmark and Finland).
In summary, after step-wise register linkage and review of death certificates, we identified 50 "new" highly probable maternal deaths and 11 suicides during pregnancy or the puerperium.
Follow-up extended from date of entry into the SCCS until the earlier of 28 February 2011 (2 months prior to the most recent SSA linkage) or date of death.
Linkage of hospital and death records also suggests that Aboriginal status is under-identified in official death records by about 27%.
Briffa et al's linkage of hospital and death records also suggests that Aboriginal status is under-identified in official death records by about 27% in WA, similar to the 26.3% reported by Neville et al. in NSW using the algorithm they considered most promising [ 26].
It is based on systematic, validated record linkage of in-patient, death certificate and primary care data to identify all admissions and all deaths that occur following discharge from hospital as well as those that occur in hospital.
