Improving Information About Private Consultants Through Data Linkage

In Austria, there is no single source of truth holding information about all physicians and their medical practice. Therefore, different sources have to be combined to accumulate detailed information about doctors, identify data errors and increase overall data quality. The aim of this project is to link two datasets from vastly different origins utilizing reproduceable and mostly automatic procedures in contrast to manually acquired links in the past. As there is no global identifier, names and addresses of the doctors were used instead. Because of different spellings and typos of names and addresses within and in between the datasets, direct comparison does not lead to satisfactory results. Therefore, probabilistic matching with string metrics was applied. The utilized methods significantly improve the linkage and allow to match about 80 % of the private consultants in both datasets.