Application of probabilistic record linkage method in communicable disease reporting information matching

Objective To match the records of communicable disease reporting information from field survey and that from communicable disease reporting system. Methods An improved method originated from Fellegi and Sunter on probabilistic record linkage techniques was used to assign similarity scores to pairs of records and treats all pairs that score above a certain threshold as matches. The probabilistic record matching results were verified manually and then the accuracy of the probabilistic record matching results was compared with the manual results. Results A total of 2153 records form a field survey for communicable disease reporting quality were stratified and matched with 97,271 records from communicable disease reporting system. The score 25 was used as the threshold. The accuracy of the probabilistic record matching method was compared with manual results. The results showed that the sensitivity of probabilistic record matching was 98.96% (95% CI: 98.39%-99.36%), the specificity was 94.92% (95% CI: 91.29%-97.35%), the total concordance rate was 98.51% (95% CI: 97.91%-98.98%), the Kappa value was 0.9250 and the area under the ROC was 0.9979. Conclusion Based on the basic theory of probabilistic record linkage, the records from two different sources were successfully matched and the results showed high accuracy and consistence.