Health administrative, or "claims" data are collected and stored by government agencies
or other payers, primarily for purposes related to their mandates: for instance, to
maintain accurate population registers, plan service delivery, and pay physicians.
As a result of its universal health care system and unique provincial identifiers
allowing linkage of multiple data sets, Canada enjoys a relatively rich health administrative
data "ecosystem" compared with many other countries.
1
This system has permitted secondary use of health administrative data for research
and quality improvement. Researchers, health authorities, and nonprofit agencies are
all naturally interested in using these data, including for cohort definition, comorbidity
adjustment, exposure classification, and outcome ascertainment. Compared with primary
data collection, using such secondary data sources has the advantages of population-level
coverage and typically a much lower (zero in some cases) cost for data collection,
increasing the feasibility of many projects. Canadian researchers have used these
data to make innumerable important methodological contributions and empirical observations
in the fields of epidemiology, health services research, health economics, and randomized
clinical trials.
2
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References
- Mining administrative health databases to advance medical science: geographical considerations and untapped potential in Canada.Can J Cardiol. 2012; 28: 152-154
- Improving cardiovascular health at population level: 39 community cluster randomised trial of Cardiovascular Health Awareness Program (CHAP).BMJ. 2011; 342: d442
- Cardiac Care Quality Indicators Report.Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, 2017
- The development and feasibility assessment of Canadian quality indicators for atrial fibrillation.Can J Cardiol. 2016; 32: 1566-1569
- Empirical insights when defining the population burden of atrial fibrillation and oral anticoagulation utilization using health administrative data.Can J Cardiol. 2019; 35: 1412-1415
- Does "secondary" atrial fibrillation really exist?.J Am Coll Cardiol Clin Electrophysiol. 2018; 4: 394-396
- Identifying patients with atrial fibrillation in administrative data.Can J Cardiol. 2016; 32: 1561-1565
Article info
Publication history
Published online: June 20, 2019
Accepted:
June 18,
2019
Received:
June 3,
2019
Footnotes
See article by Hawkins et al., pages 1412–1415 of this issue.
See page 1290 for disclosure information.
Identification
Copyright
© 2019 Canadian Cardiovascular Society. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
ScienceDirect
Access this article on ScienceDirectLinked Article
- Empirical Insights When Defining the Population Burden of Atrial Fibrillation and Oral Anticoagulation Utilization Using Administrative DataCanadian Journal of CardiologyVol. 35Issue 10
- PreviewHealth administrative data are routinely used to assess disease burden, quality of care, and outcomes for atrial fibrillation (AF). Governments, administrators, and researchers define cohorts differently, based on 3 key factors: the case definition algorithm to identify AF, inclusion/exclusion of transient AF, and the lookback period to identify cases. We assessed the impact of varying these key factors on estimates of the use of guideline-indicated oral anticoagulation (OAC). Hospitalization, ED, and outpatient claim databases were linked in British Columbia.
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