Use of Commercial Record Linkage Software and Vital Statistics to Identify Patient Deaths

n J Am Med Inform Assoc. 1997;4:233–237. Large administrative databases are increasingly being used to compare mortality across hospitals. However one limitation of these databases is that they include only in-patient mortality. Information on out-of-hospital deaths can be obtained on a patient-by-patient basis from centralized death certificate registries, such as the National Death Index or the Canadian Mortality Database. However, the turn-around time and charge per record linked make such a procedure unfeasible for hospitals or managed care organizations that wish to link all of their records and create their Affiliations of the authors: Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics (TBN), Laboratory Medicine (TBN, ANB), and Pediatrics (TBN), School of Medicine, University of California, San