gms | German Medical Science

Background and Purpose: Use of health care services is the point where patients’ needs meet the professional system. The patterns of health care use strongly depends on the life conditions and needs of the individual as well as the accessibility of health care services. However, there is still a relatively incomplete understanding of the broader array of factors affecting the patient journey. The purpose is to describe the construct of a database based on nationwide population-based registers, designed for risk assessment and mapping patient journeys in health care.

Methods: The database covers individual level linked information obtained from ten Danish population-based registers.

Research Focus: The sample includes patients aged 65+, discharged from Danish public hospitals from 1 January 2007 to 30 September 2010. Data comprises demographic and social determinants linked with information on health and health care use.

Methodological Focus: The pre-modelling phase comprised five steps:

1.

Identification of registers and data,

2.

Definition of the population,

3.

Definition of the index-admission and outcome,

4.

Groups of variables and

5.

Data management and merging

Results: The database includes 1,267,752 admissions for 479,854 unique persons.

Conclusions: The database is multi-component and multi-disciplinary in orientation. The architecture makes it possible to map individual life- and health trajectories over time, transcending organisational boundaries within social and health care services. The development of the database is neither final nor static and it is possible to broaden the database by including new variables and to update it for further epidemiological and clinical research.