Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2021 Apr 27:6:90.
doi: 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.16737.1. eCollection 2021.

Identifying Care Home Residents in Electronic Health Records - An OpenSAFELY Short Data Report

Anna Schultze  1 , Chris Bates  2 , Jonathan Cockburn  2 , Brian MacKenna  3 , Emily Nightingale  1   4 , Helen J Curtis  3 , William J Hulme  3 , Caroline E Morton  3 , Richard Croker  3 , Seb Bacon  3 , Helen I McDonald  1 , Christopher T Rentsch  1 , Krishnan Bhaskaran  1 , Rohini Mathur  1 , Laurie A Tomlinson  1 , Elizabeth J Williamson  1 , Harriet Forbes  1 , John Tazare  1 , Daniel J Grint  1 , Alex J Walker  3 , Peter Inglesby  3 , Nicholas J DeVito  3 , Amir Mehrkar  3 , George Hickman  3 , Simon Davy  3 , Tom Ward  3 , Louis Fisher  3 , David Evans  3 , Kevin Wing  1 , Angel Ys Wong  1 , Robert McManus  2 , John Parry  2 , Frank Hester  2 , Sam Harper  2 , Stephen Jw Evans  1 , Ian J Douglas  1 , Liam Smeeth  1 , Rosalind M Eggo  1   4 , Ben Goldacre  3
Affiliations

Identifying Care Home Residents in Electronic Health Records - An OpenSAFELY Short Data Report

Anna Schultze et al. Wellcome Open Res. .

Abstract

Background: Care home residents have been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Electronic Health Records (EHR) hold significant potential for studying the healthcare needs of this vulnerable population; however, identifying care home residents in EHR is not straightforward. We describe and compare three different methods for identifying care home residents in the newly created OpenSAFELY-TPP data analytics platform. Methods: Working on behalf of NHS England, we identified individuals aged 65 years or older potentially living in a care home on the 1st of February 2020 using (1) a complex address linkage, in which cleaned GP registered addresses were matched to old age care home addresses using data from the Care and Quality Commission (CQC); (2) coded events in the EHR; (3) household identifiers, age and household size to identify households with more than 3 individuals aged 65 years or older as potential care home residents. Raw addresses were not available to the investigators. Results: Of 4,437,286 individuals aged 65 years or older, 2.27% were identified as potential care home residents using the complex address linkage, 1.96% using coded events, 3.13% using household size and age and 3.74% using either of these methods. 53,210 individuals (32.0% of all potential care home residents) were classified as care home residents using all three methods. Address linkage had the largest overlap with the other methods; 93.3% of individuals identified as care home residents using the address linkage were also identified as such using either coded events or household age and size. Conclusion: We have described the partial overlap between three methods for identifying care home residents in EHR, and provide detailed instructions for how to implement these in OpenSAFELY-TPP to support research into the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on care home residents.

Keywords: Address Linkage; Care Homes; Electronic Health Records.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: TPP provided technical expertise and infrastructure within their data centre pro bono in the context of a national emergency. BG’s work on better use of data in healthcare more broadly is currently funded in part by: NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre, NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Oxford and Thames Valley, the MohnWestlake Foundation, NHS England, and the Health Foundation; all DataLab staff are supported by BG’s grants on this work. AS is employed by LSHTM on a fellowship sponsored by GSK. LS reports grants from Wellcome, MRC, NIHR, UKRI, British Council, GSK, British Heart Foundation, and Diabetes UK outside this work. HIM is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Protection Research Unit in Immunisation, a partnership between Public Health England and LSHTM. AYSW holds a fellowship from BHF. EW holds grants from MRC. IJD holds shares in and has received unrestricted grants from GSK grants, as well as grants from NIHR. HF holds a UKRI fellowship.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. Overlap of care home residency identification using different methodologies.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.. Percentage of potential care home residents identified using each method.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Deaths involving COVID-19 in the care sector, England and Wales. Office for National Statistics. Reference Source
    1. Hanratty B, Burton JK, Goodman C, et al. : Covid-19 and lack of linked datasets for care homes. BMJ. 2020;369:m2463. 10.1136/bmj.m2463 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Burton JK, Guthrie B: Identifying who lives in a care home-a challenge to be conquered. Age Ageing. 2018;47(3):322–323. 10.1093/ageing/afx200 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Vivaldi 1: coronavirus (COVID-19) care homes study report. GOV.UK. Reference Source
    1. Dutey-Magni PF, Williams H, Jhass A, et al. : COVID-19 infection and attributable mortality in UK care homes: Cohort study using active surveillance and electronic records (March-June 2020). medRxiv. 2021;2020.07.14.20152629. 10.1101/2020.07.14.20152629 - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources