Privacy-Preserving Record Linkage of Deidentified Records Within a Public Health Surveillance System: Evaluation Study (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND The Australian Collaboration for Coordinated Enhanced Sentinel Surveillance (ACCESS) was established to monitor national testing and test outcomes for blood-borne viruses (BBVs) and sexually transmissible infections (STIs) in key populations. ACCESS extracts deidentified data from sentinel health services that include general practice, sexual health, and infectious disease clinics, as well as public and private laboratories that conduct a large volume of BBV/STI testing. An important attribute of ACCESS is the ability to accurately link individual-level records within and between the participating sites, as this enables the system to produce reliable epidem..