Validating the Matching of Patients in the Linkage of a Large Hospital System's EHR with State and National Death Databases.

Background: Though electronic health record (EHR) data have been linked to national and state death registries, such linkages have rarely been validated for an entire hospital system's EHR.

Objectives: The aim of the study is to validate West Virginia University Medicine's (WVU Medicine) linkage of its EHR to three external death registries: the Social Security Death Masterfile (SSDMF), the national death index (NDI), the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR).

Methods: Probabilistic matching was used to link patients to NDI and deterministic matching for the SSDMF and DHHR vital statistics records (WVDMF).

Validating the extract, transform, load process used to populate a large clinical research database.

Background: Informaticians at any institution that are developing clinical research support infrastructure are tasked with populating research databases with data extracted and transformed from their institution's operational databases, such as electronic health records (EHRs). These data must be properly extracted from these source systems, transformed into a standard data structure, and then loaded into the data warehouse while maintaining the integrity of these data. We validated the correctness of the extract, load, and transform (ETL) process of the extracted data of West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute's Integrated Data Repository, a clinical data warehouse that includes data extracted from two EHR systems.