Background
The Coordination of Health Care (CHC) Study was developed to address the paucity of information on continuity of care in Australia.
Aim
The Study aims to link prospective and retrospective hospital, emergency department (ED), Medicare and pharmaceutical claims data for consenting participants from the 2016 Survey of Health Care (designed to report on samples from Primary Health Networks).
Methods
The methodology will use probabilistic linking for hospital and ED data. Approximately 26,500 Survey respondents consented to hospital and ED linkage.
For the consenting cohort, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) will create a CHC cohort identifier dataset with a Project Specific ID (PSID) and variables. The ABS will provide the whole CHC cohort identifier dataset to state and territory Data Linkage Units. The state and territory data custodians will map the PSID to the National Minimum Dataset (NMDS) IDs. The AIHW will use the PSID and NMDS IDs to extract content data of consenting participants in the National Hospital Morbidity Database and National Non-Admitted Patient Emergency Department Care Database and provide to the ABS for merging with the Survey. A de-identified linked dataset will then be provided to AIHW researchers for analysis.
Results
Ethics and data custodian approvals are in place for data linkage to occur, with local level reporting to happen thereafter.
Conclusion
A suite of information will be available on continuity of care to provide opportunities for research and analysis on a broad range of health care related policy questions, patient experience and outcomes.