Establishing a framework for privacy-preserving record linkage among electronic health record and administrative claims databases within PCORnet®, the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to determine whether a secure, privacy-preserving record linkage (PPRL) methodology can be implemented in a scalable manner for use in a large national clinical research network. RESULTS: We established the governance and technical capacity to support the use of PPRL across the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet®). As a pilot, four sites used the Datavant software to transform patient personally identifiable information (PII) into de-identified tokens. We queried the sites for patients with a clinical encounter in 2018 or 2019 and matched their tokens to determine whether overlap existed. We described patient overlap among the sites and generated a "deduplicated" table of patient demographic characteristics. Overlapping patients were found in 3 of the 6 site-pairs. Following deduplication, the total patient count was 3,108,515 (0.11% reduction), with the largest reduction in count for patients with an "Other/Missing" value for Sex; from 198 to 163 (17.6% reduction). The PPRL solution successfully links patients across data sources using distributed queries without directly accessing patient PII. The overlap queries and analysis performed in this pilot is being replicated across the full network to provide additional insight into patient linkages among a distributed research network.

publication date

  • October 31, 2022

Research

keywords

  • Electronic Health Records
  • Privacy

Identity

PubMed Central ID

  • PMC9620597

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 85140934253

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.3233/sji-210891

PubMed ID

  • 36316778

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 15

issue

  • 1