An Overview of Record Linkage Methods: Applications and Perspective on Health Data

Record linkage has become a powerful tool for public health, since the rise of medical and administrative database or cohort (Loth, 2015). This process allows matching individual's information obtained from different databases which don't have necessarily a common identifier. Furthermore, if such common identifier exists it could take a long time to obtain the necessary approval to use it. In France, the NIR is the identifier which is the most likely to be an identifier at the national level. However, in order to use the NIR, it is still compulsory to obtain the authorization from the CNIL even after the change of law concerning the modernization of the French Healthcare system. This paper presents a broad set of methods to perform record linkage, in particular the method proposed by Fellegi and Sunter and its extensions. The aim is to give some guidelines to researchers and to introduce some approaches to incorporate uncertainty associated with the linkage in their analysis.