Linkage of hospital records and death certificates by a search engine and machine learning: training and test set data

<p>INTRODUCTION: Vital status is of central importance to hospital clinical research. However, hospital information systems record only in-hospital death information. Recently, the French government released a publicly available dataset containing death-certificate data for over 25 million individuals. The objective of this study was to link French death certificates to the Bordeaux University Hospital records to complete the vital status information.</p> <p>MATERIALS AND METHODS: Our linkage strategy was composed of a search engine to reduce the number of comparisons and machine-learning algorithms. The overall pipeline was evaluated by assembling a file containing 3,565 in-hospital deaths and 15,000 alive persons.</p> <p>RESULTS: The recall and precision of our linkage strategy were 97.5% and 99.97% for the upper threshold and 99.4% and 98.9% for the lower threshold, respectively.</p> <p>CONCLUSION: In this article, we demonstrated the feasibility of accurately linking hospital records with death certificates using a search engine and machine learning.</p>