Use of simulated patients (SPs) ensured standardisation of key variables (e.g. barriers to behaviour change).
Briefly, this process consists of nine steps, including standardisation of linkage variables, determination of the quality of coding and quality assessment of linked data [ 22].
Improved collection and standardisation of additional variables such as co-morbidity, anaesthetic risk and treatment pathways may be crucial for a better understanding of underlying mechanisms of inter-country differences in survival of patients with cancer.
Lack of full information within some items compared with ASIDD and the consensus statements suggests that the insurance data could be improved on in the future with the collection of additional details and standardisation of data variables.
All efforts (collection and standardisation of additional variables such as co-morbidity) to investigate the reasons for these disparities in management between these two countries, and more generally across Europe, should be encouraged.
Other data cleaning techniques not investigated here such as address standardisation increase the number of variables available for comparison and these techniques may improve quality.
The HIV prevention efforts in this Indian state would benefit from standardisation of the highly variable services provided by peer educators, who form an important part of the sex worker programmes.
In view of this standardisation, the variables viz., region and type of therapy were omitted from the analysis.
The results are presented as unstandardised and standardised regression coefficients (95% CI), following standardisation of both exposure and outcome variables.
The services provided by peer educators, who form an important part of the sex worker programmes, were highly variable, standardisation of which would be useful.
