Potential Uses and Limitations of Hospital Data in Epidemiologic Research

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Abstract
The purpose is to discover either characteristics associated with the cases or the frequency and distribution of the cases which may lead to a better understanding of the cause and prevention of these conditions. There are 2 types of epidemiologic studies, those in which the cases identified in hospitals are related to a hospital-based population and those related to a community-based population. The 1st type of studies involves the fundamental operation of relating groups of cases to persons at risk to acquiring a condition, or to control groups. By using hospital data in this way one may study: disease resulting from hospitalization, the natural history of disease, characteristics associated with disease, and associations between diseases. The 2nd type of studies uses hospital data in determining disease morbidity, describing demographic patterns of disease, identifying instances of familial occurrence of disease, and for comparing hospital and death certificate indexing of fatal disease. The potential limitations of hospital data such as selection of cases, difficulty of finding adequate controls, incomplete records and inability to precisely define a community served by any hospital system were reviewed. Emphasis was placed on using hospital data in collaboration with other health records in doing epidemiologic studies of disease.