Identifying psychiatric patients’ pathways of care by record linkage after pseudonymisation: linking inpatient and outpatient data for the total population of a province of Austria

Background/Objectives: Health service utilization is usually described by event statistics, e.g. by frequencies or rates of ambulatory contacts or of hospital discharges for a given geographical area. Linking of patients’ records across health care domains, i.e. depicting typical pathways of patients, is not easily possible. However, such record linkage would be extremely important for health care planning and realistic cost calculation, for instance in order to identify typical referral patterns, repeated utilization of the same type of service („revolving door psychiatry“), or more than average utilization of…