ArticlePloS one2023
Identification of people with low prevalence diseases in administrative healthcare records: A case study of HIV in British Columbia, Canada.
Article in PloS one, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Clinical Characteristics, Healthcare Utilization, and Treatment Patterns Among People Living with HIV by Antiretroviral Therapy Use in the USA, 2021-2024.Infectious diseases and therapy · 2026Article
- Enhancing identification of suspected unregulated drug toxicity deaths in administrative health records: a case study among people with HIV in British Columbia, Canada.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Validation of algorithms for identifying people living with HIV in French medico-administrative databases: implications for HIV surveillance.BMC medical research methodology · 2026Article
- Unsuppressed HIV viral load among people living with HIV by exposure category in British Columbia, Canada from 2005 to 2020: a population-based cohort study.BMC global and public health · 2025Article
- Identifying hospitalization episodes of care among people with and without HIV in British Columbia, Canada.BMC medical research methodology · 2025Article
- Article
- Cohort Profile Update: Reflecting back and looking ahead: Updating the Comparative Outcomes and Service Utilization Trends (COAST) Study to include 28 years of linked data from people with and without HIV in British Columbia, Canada.International journal of population data science · 2025Article
- Secondary use of routinely collected administrative health data for epidemiologic research: Answering research questions using data collected for a different purpose.International journal of population data science · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
14 authors.
Funding
Abstract
introductionCase-finding algorithms can be applied to administrative healthcare records to identify people with diseases, including people with HIV (PWH). When supplementing an existing registry of a low prevalence disease, near-perfect specificity helps minimize impacts of adding in algorithm-identified false positive cases. We evaluated the performance of algorithms applied to healthcare records to supplement an HIV registry in British Columbia (BC), Canada.
methodsWe applied algorithms based on HIV-related diagnostic codes to healthcare practitioner and hospitalization records. We evaluated 28 algorithms in a validation sub-sample of 7,124 persons with positive HIV tests (2,817 with a prior negative test) from the STOP HIV/AIDS data linkage-a linkage of healthcare, clinical, and HIV test records for PWH in BC, resembling a disease registry (1996-2020). Algorithms were primarily assessed based on their specificity-derived from this validation sub-sample-and their impact on the estimate of the total number of PWH in BC as of 2020.
resultsIn the validation sub-sample, median age at positive HIV test was 37 years (Q1: 30, Q3: 46), 80.1% were men, and 48.9% resided in the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority. For all algorithms, specificity exceeded 97% and sensitivity ranged from 81% to 95%. To supplement the HIV registry, we selected an algorithm with 99.89% (95% CI: 99.76% - 100.00%) specificity and 82.21% (95% CI: 81.26% - 83.16%) sensitivity, requiring five HIV-related healthcare practitioner encounters or two HIV-related hospitalizations within a 12-month window, or one hospitalization with HIV as the most responsible diagnosis. Upon adding PWH identified by this highly-specific algorithm to the registry, 8,774 PWH were present in BC as of March 2020, of whom 333 (3.8%) were algorithm-identified. DISCUSSION: In the context of an existing low prevalence disease registry, the results of our validation study demonstrate the value of highly-specific case-finding algorithms applied to administrative healthcare records to enhance our ability to estimate the number of PWH living in BC.
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