Record Linkage system in a complex relational database - MINPHIS example.

In the health sector, record linkage is of paramount importance as clinical data can be distributed across different data repositories leading to duplication. Record Linkage is the process of tracking duplicate records that actually refers to the same entity. This paper proposes a fast and efficient method for duplicates detection within the healthcare domain. The first step is to standardize the data in the database using SQL. The second is to match similar pair records, and third step is to organize records into match and non-match status. The system was developed in Unified Modeling Language and Java. In the batch analysis of 31, 177 "supposedly" distinct identities, our method isolates 25, 117 true unique records and 6, 060 suspected duplicates using a healthcare system called MINPHIS (Made in Nigeria Primary Healthcare Information System) as the test bed.