Closing Health Data Gaps
by
Anil Gupta
Health Canada, Ottawa, Canada
Coauthors: Kapur, Vishnu

One long-standing and major impediment facing health care analysts and health economists is lack of integrated and comprehensive data sources. Where data exists, there is often either no or only limited access to data. Classic examples of available but inaccessible data are medicare and hospital care micro-data. In other cases, the data may be scattered over a number of different sources, creating a need to link data sets. One of the major constraints in linking such data are concerns about confidentiality. A comprehensive micro-data base that would allow in-depth analyses of supply and demand of physician services in Canada has yet to be constructed. The need for comprehensive health data in evidence-based decision-making cannot be over-emphasised. One strategy that health care analysts employ is to synthesize data from diverse sources in order to build a comprehensive database. This paper presents this strategy in some detail with examples. First, it portrays an overview of the current methodologies in imputation and merging of data from a number of sources. Next, it describes the experience of some of the other countries (specially the United States) to overcome data problems. The paper then presents some initiatives currently under way at Health Canada to synthesize data from different sources. It describes the innovative approaches we have developed to overcoming problems that merging and imputing data from different sources invariably present.

Date received: November 22, 2001

Copyright © 2001 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # caim-07.