Summary Report of the Incidence and Prevalence of Worker Injury and Subsequent Outcome in British Columbia: a Record Linkage Study.

Starting in June, 1997, the Workers' Compensation Board of BC made available computerized records of all injured workers claims, from 1986 to 1996, to the UBC Centre for Health Services and Policy Research. Using 'personal identifier' fields such as PHN, name, birth date, sec and postal code, we were able to link approximately 75% of 1.6 million Income Assistance records provided to us by the Ministry of Human Resources. Once the personal identifier field from the injured workers file were succesfully matched to an individual in our Linkage Co-ordinating File, the scrambled Personal Health Number was added to the record in the WCB identifier file. This process allowed us to merge the WCB files of specific individuals with other files in the BCLCDB in order to produce longitudinal records of health services utilization for individual injured workers.