Linking mortality data with hospital morbidity data--a pilot study.
Record linkage is becoming an increasingly important technique in moni toring health outcomes. In this study we wought to examine the feasibility of linking mortality data held by the Registry of Birth, Deaths and Marriages with the Patient Master Index (PMI) at St. Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne, in order to document deaths soon after hospital discharge. Linkage was carried out using demographic details. Registry data required extensive editing and formatting prior to being matched with the PMI. 86.2% of cases identified by the computer algorithm were actual cases. Mortality data are an important source of information on health outcome but a process is needed to make them more usable. We have described one such method and suggested where the process could have been streamlined. The use of unique identifiers would have facilitated the matching process, curtailing several processing steps.