Linking national primary care electronic health records to individual records from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey: evaluating the likelihood of linkage based on patient health.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

To evaluate the likelihood of linking electronic health records (EHRs) to restricted individual-level American Community Survey (ACS) data based on patient health condition.

Materials and methods

Electronic health records (2019-2021) are derived from a primary care registry collected by the American Board of Family Medicine. These data were assigned anonymized person-level identifiers (Protected Identification Keys [PIKs]) at the U.S. Census Bureau. These records were then linked to restricted individual-level data from the ACS (2005-2022). We used logistic regressions to evaluate match rates for patients with health conditions across a range of severity: hypertension, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease.

Results

Among more than 2.8 million patients, 99.2%

SUBMITTER: Limburg A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11648727 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature