Linkage of National Data on Assisted Reproductive Technology with Vital Records in Florida, Massachusetts, and Michigan

• Activity Number: 520
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 1, 2012 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Yujia Zhang*+ and Bruce Cohen and William Sappenfield and Violanda Grigorescu and Tonji Durant and Maurizio Macaluso
• Companies: CDC and Massachusetts Department of Public Health and University of South Florida and CDC and CDC and Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
• Keywords: Assisted reproductive technology ; Birth-infant death file ; Probabilistic linkage

Abstract

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) is increasingly common: according to CDC's National ART Surveillance System (NASS), 142,435 ART cycles were initiated in 2007. CDC's NASS collects limited data on pregnancy outcomes. State-based vital record systems contain more information on maternal characteristics and pregnancy outcomes, but limited information on conception methods.

We assessed the validity of a new probabilistic linkage (PL) algorithm based on indirect identifiers against the previous linkage results, and applied it to linking NASS data with vital records in Florida (2004-2006), Massachusetts (2001-2005) and Michigan (2000-2004).

Application of the PL algorithm to the 1997-2000 Massachusetts data matched 5,390 (88%) of 6,139 ART deliveries with birth records, correctly identifying 96% of the previous matches. Application of the PL algorithm to other states and years led to matching 4,572 (91%) of 5,035 ART deliveries in Florida (2004-2006), 10,181 (90%) of 11,261 in Massachusetts (2001-2005), and 4,073 (92%) of 4,429 in Michigan (2000-2004).

(The corresponding paper was accepted and published online on 09/09/2011 by Maternal and Child Health Journal)