Linkage, evaluation and analysis of national electronic healthcare data: application to providing enhanced blood-stream infection surveillance in paediatric intensive care.

BACKGROUND: Linkage of risk-factor data for blood-stream infection (BSI) in paediatric intensive care (PICU) with bacteraemia surveillance data to monitor risk-adjusted infection rates in PICU is complicated by a lack of unique identifiers and under-ascertainment in the national surveillance system. We linked, evaluated and performed preliminary analyses on these data to provide a practical guide on the steps required to handle linkage of such complex data sources. METHODS: Data on PICU admissions in England and Wales for 2003-2010 were extracted from the Paediatric Intensive Care Audit Network. Records of all positive isolates from blood cultures taken for children <16 years and captured by the national voluntary laboratory surveillance system for 2003-2010 were extracted from the Public Health England database, LabBase2. "Gold-standard" datasets with unique identifiers were obtained directly from three laboratories, containing microbiology reports that were eligible for submission to LabBase2 (defined as "clinically significant" by laboratory microbiologists). Reports in the gold-standard datasets were compared to those in LabBase2 to estimate ascertainment in LabBase2. Linkage evaluated by comparing results from two classification methods (highest-weight classification of match weights and prior-informed imputation using match probabilities) with linked records in the gold-standard data. BSI rate was estimated as the proportion of admissions associated with at least one BSI. RESULTS: Reporting gaps were identified in 548/2596 lab-months of LabBase2. Ascertainment of clinically significant BSI in the remaining months was approximately 80-95%. Prior-informed imputation provided the least biased estimate of BSI rate (5.8% of admissions). Adjusting for ascertainment, the estimated BSI rate was 6.1-7.3%. CONCLUSION: Linkage of PICU admission data with national BSI surveillance provides the opportunity for enhanced surveillance but analyses based on these data need to take account of biases due to ascertainment and linkage error. This study provides a generalisable guide for linkage, evaluation and analysis of complex electronic healthcare data.