Our services
The CHeReL provides advice on the design, cost, feasibility and
process of linkage studies. We offer four types of record
linkage services:
- Linkage between and within records held in the Master
Linkage Key (MLK). The MLK consists of records from a
number of administrative datasets, including records of
hospitalisations, emergency department presentations, births,
cancer registrations and deaths. An example of a study using
MLK linkage services could be linking death records to
hospitalisations to assess mortality within 30 days of hospital
discharge
- Linkage of other datasets to the MLK. Often researchers
are interested in a particular cohort of people, and want to
examine their outcomes or history using routinely collected
administrative records. For example, a cohort of people may
be receiving a particular intervention, and the researcher wants to
determine the effectiveness of this intervention as measured by
later hospital admissions, emergency department presentations and
mortality.
- Linkage of two or more datasets that are not included in the
MLK - for example, linkage of educational outcome to child
protection data
- Deduplication of datasets. The CHeReL regularly conducts
this kind of linkage for data custodians to identify duplicate
records within a dataset and records which belong to the same
person.
