LAUNCHES QI linkage: R code for the linkage of clinical records using patient identifiers

The directory contains two main R programs:

• RprocessNCHDAdata.R (process data identifiers and create Dataset2)
• RlinkNCHDAdata.R (link internally NCHDA and save the matches and linkage type; create and save an anonymised LAUNCHES patient ID)

There are also 3 files with defined R functions:

• LAUNCHES_Dataset1_alldata_lib.R (functions used to create Dataet1, the source for Dataset2)
• LAUNCHES_Dataset2_identifierdata_lib.R (functions used to create Dataset2)
• LAUNCHES_Dataset3_linkedrecords_lib.R (functions useful to link records or evaluate the quality of matches)

The other 3 csv files used to process postcodes were:

• LAUNCHES_UK_Lookup_Postcode_Country.csv (Not avalable, it is created from code after downloading the full list of postcodes from ODS)
• UK_Postcode_Areas.xlsx
• ets.csv