ArticleJournal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA2012
A simple heuristic for blindfolded record linkage.
Article in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Data linkage multiplies research insights across diverse healthcare sectors.Communications medicine · 2025Review
- Article
- Linkage of Australian national registry data using a statistical linkage key.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2021Article
- CANDIDATE: A tool for generating anonymous participant-linking IDs in multi-session studies.PloS one · 2021Article
- Fueling Clinical and Translational Research in Appalachia: Informatics Platform Approach.JMIR medical informatics · 2020Article
- Data linkages between patient-powered research networks and health plans: a foundation for collaborative research.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2019Article
- Privacy preserving linkage using multiple match-keys.International journal of population data science · 2019Article
- Tools and Methods for Real-World Evidence Generation: Pragmatic Trials, Electronic Consent, and Data Linkages.Rheumatic diseases clinics of North America · 2019Review
- Data Science for Child Health.The Journal of pediatrics · 2019Review
- Genome privacy: challenges, technical approaches to mitigate risk, and ethical considerations in the United States.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2017Review
- Bidirectional Data Collaborations in Distributed Research.EGEMS (Washington, DC) · 2016Article
- Electronic Public Health Registry of Extensively Drug-Resistant Organisms, Illinois, USA.Emerging infectious diseases · 2015Article
- Design and implementation of a privacy preserving electronic health record linkage tool in Chicago.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2015Article
- Linked Records of Children with Traumatic Brain Injury. Probabilistic Linkage without Use of Protected Health Information.Methods of information in medicine · 2015Article
- Linking electronic health records to better understand breast cancer patient pathways within and between two health systems.EGEMS (Washington, DC) · 2015Article
- Designing an algorithm to preserve privacy for medical record linkage with error-prone data.JMIR medical informatics · 2014Article
- Article
- SOEMPI: A Secure Open Enterprise Master Patient Index Software Toolkit for Private Record Linkage.AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium · 2014Article
- Biomedical data privacy: problems, perspectives, and recent advances.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2013Article
- Anonymous Record Linkage Between EPR and CDW-H: Toward Development of a Federated Genotype-Phenotype System.AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Science proceedings. AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Science · 2013Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesTo address the challenge of balancing privacy with the need to create cross-site research registry records on individual patients, while matching the data for a given patient as he or she moves between participating sites. To evaluate the strategy of generating anonymous identifiers based on real identifiers in such a way that the chances of a shared patient being accurately identified were maximized, and the chances of incorrectly joining two records belonging to different people were minimized.
methodsOur hypothesis was that most variation in names occurs after the first two letters, and that date of birth is highly reliable, so a single match variable consisting of a hashed string built from the first two letters of the patient's first and last names plus their date of birth would have the desired characteristics. We compared and contrasted the match algorithm characteristics (rate of false positive v. rate of false negative) for our chosen variable against both Social Security Numbers and full names.
resultsIn a data set of 19 000 records, a derived match variable consisting of a 2-character prefix from both first and last names combined with date of birth has a 97% sensitivity; by contrast, an anonymized identifier based on the patient's full names and date of birth has a sensitivity of only 87% and SSN has sensitivity 86%.
conclusionThe approach we describe is most useful in situations where privacy policies preclude the full exchange of the identifiers required by more sophisticated and sensitive linkage algorithms. For data sets of sufficiently high quality this effective approach, while producing a lower rate of matching than more complex algorithms, has the merit of being easy to explain to institutional review boards, adheres to the minimum necessary rule of the HIPAA privacy rule, and is faster and less cumbersome to implement than a full probabilistic linkage.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.