Wednesday, February 22, 2017

DAD files - location information

Question
I have a researcher that is interested in the Discharge Abstract Database (DAD) files. Looking at the files on the EFT, there does not appear to be facility location information or number of beds for each facility or if the facility is located in a rural or urban area. The researcher would like access this information. It is possible to get access to this information?

Answer
I received a response from CIHI:

“In short, this kind of information is not available in the DAD-DLI files. The DAD DLI files are a heavily de-identified, randomized 10% sample of the original DAD dataset. During the de-identification process we remove any data elements that may be potentially used to re-identify patients or facilities. This would include things like facility location, number of beds, urban/rural etc.

However, we do have information on the facility location and urban/rural status in the original DAD datasets. The number of beds is also available, but this may have to be brought in via another CIHI data holding.

If the researcher is interested in obtaining this kind of data through CIHI, I would suggest they fill out a data inquiry form, here:

https://forums.cihi.ca/Forms/DataInquiry/data_inquiry_e.asp