Improved methods for estimating incidence from linked hospital morbidity data

Abstract

A new method is presented for estimating incidence trends in disease from linked hospital morbidity data. The advantages of this method are its ease of use with routinely collected data and the relatively low cost of applying it in comparison with community surveys or maintaining formal disease registers. The method has other applications using linked data, such as the study of trends in first-time health care procedures and pharmaceutical prescriptions.