Multifile Probabilistic Record Linkage for Drug Overdose Surveillance and Public Health Action

While record linkage is a commonplace problem in public health work, rule-based deterministic methods have historically been more common in practice than probabilistic methods. In this talk, we will describe efforts to put modern probabilistic record linkage methods into practice at Public Health - Seattle and King County. As part of the overdose surveillance work at Public Health - Seattle and King County, we are interested in measuring the incidence of fatal and non-fatal overdoses following jail stays. This requires the linkage of King County jail booking data, emergency medical services data, and death certificate data. We will detail a recently proposed probabilistic record linkage method, multilink, how it was used to link these sources, and the subsequent analyses of overdose incidence following jail stays.