A process model for acquiring international administrative routine data for health services research

Abstract

Objectives: To describe a practical and standardized approach for acquiring international administrative routine data from different data owners for research.Methods: Best practice approach based on the experiences gained during the EU-funded ADVOCATE (“Added Value for Oral Care”) project that involved the collection of routinely collected administrative data from health insurance providers, health funds or health authorities in six European countries.Results: A general process for data acquisition that contains four phases was developed: First, the conditions for data usage and access are determined. These conditions are subsequently tested by sharing and analyzing a data sample (quality and validity audit). After optimizing the process model, full-scale data access and analysis are performed.Conclusions: The general data acquisition approach has successfully been applied in the ADVOCATE project to acquire claims data from eight data owners, which prescribed different usage conditions in each case. The approach aims to make a contribution to a standardized process model for acquiring administrative routine data for research and providing researchers with a methodological framework.

Keywords

• administrative data
• health information technology
• health services research
• secondary data analysis
• best practice