'Effective advertisement and marketing campaign towards green efforts of organization,' and 'IT enablement and effective communication' have been found out as linkage variables in our study.
The 2007 household component of the MEPS was merged with the 2007 medical provider component according to the appropriate linkage variables in SPSS 17.0 (Chicago, IL).
After linkage with the population register using linkage variables 'date of birth', 'gender' and 'numerical part of postal code', 25,142 and 22,470 admissions came from patients with a unique combination of linkage variables in the population register (88%and87%7%, respectively).
For example, masked variables such as surname or DOB from a single record get randomly assigned to different records (i.e. masked linkage variables in the shuffled record no longer belong to the same person, Fig. 3).
This step is critical as non-pre-processed linkage variables result in a decreased linkage proportion because true matches are more frequently missed [ 22].
For more information about the data sources, data linkage, variable definitions and unit costs, please see Supplementary data in Age and Ageing online, Appendix S1.
When the Medicare card number was not used (demographic variables only), all 170 records in each dataset matched exactly for every linkage variable.
The templates are supplied to the individual sites allowing them to perform standardized data cleaning procedures that result in linkage variables with similar data quality and harmonized formats.
Patients registered in the hospital register were identified in the population register using linkage variables 'date of birth', 'gender' and 'numeric part of postal code'.
While this method violates the assumptions of independence underlying probabilistic record linkage [ 41], linkage variables are almost never independent, and such techniques have been implemented in some linkage packages.
