scholarly journals Linking National Immigration Data to Provincial Repositories: The case of Canada

Author(s):  
Marcelo Urquia ◽  
Randy Walld ◽  
Susitha Wanigaratne ◽  
Nkiruka Eze ◽  
Mahmoud Azimaee ◽  
...  

BackgroundCanadian health data repositories link datasets at the provincial level, based on their residents’ registrations to provincial health insurance plans. Linking national datasets with provincial health care registries poses several challenges that may result in misclassification and impact the estimation of linkage rates. A recent linkage of a federal immigration database in the province of Manitoba illustrates these challenges. Objectivesa) To describe the linkage of the federal Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada Permanent Resident (IRCC-PR) database with the Manitoba healthcare registry and b) compare data linkage methods and rates between four Canadian provinces accounting for interprovincial mobility of immigrants. MethodsWe compared linkage rates by immigrant’s province of intended destination (province vs. rest of Canada). We used external nationwide immigrant tax filing records to approximate actual settlement and obtain linkage rates corrected for interprovincial mobility. ResultsThe immigrant linkage rates in Manitoba before and after accounting for interprovincial mobility were 84.8% and 96.1, respectively. Linkage rates did not substantially differ according to immigrants’ characteristics, with a few exceptions. Observed linkage rates across the four provinces ranged from 74.0% to 86.7%. After correction for interprovincial mobility, the estimated linkage rates increased >10 percentage points for the provinces that stratified by intended destination (British Columbia and Manitoba) and decreased up to 18 percentage points for provinces that could not use immigration records of those who did not intend to settle in the province (New Brunswick and Ontario). ConclusionsDespite variations in methodology, provincial linkage rates were relatively high. The use of a national immigration dataset for linkage to provincial repositories allows a more comprehensive linkage than that of province-specific subsets. Observed linkage rates can be biased downwards by interprovincial migration, and methods that use external data sources can contribute to assessing potential selection bias and misclassification.

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 295 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Srikanthan ◽  
H. Mai ◽  
N. Penner ◽  
E. Amir ◽  
A. Laupacis ◽  
...  

Background The pan-Canadian Oncology Drug Review (pcodr) was implemented in 2011 to address uneven drug coverage and lack of transparency with respect to the various provincial cancer drug review processes in Canada. We evaluated the impact of the pcodr on provincial decision concordance and time from Notice of Compliance (noc) to drug funding.Methods In a retrospective review, Health Canada’s Drug Product Database was used to identify new indications for cancer drugs between January 2003 and May 2014, and provincial formulary listings for drug-funding dates and decisions between 1 January 2003 and 31 December 2014 were retrieved. Multiple linear models and quantile regressions were used to evaluate changes in time to decision-making before and after the implementation of the pcodr. Agreement of decisions between provinces was evaluated using kappa statistics.Results Data were available from 9 provinces (all Canadian provinces except Quebec), identifying 88 indications that represented 51 unique cancer drugs. Two provinces lacked available data for all 88 indications at the time of data collection. Interprovincial concordance in drug funding decisions significantly increased after the pcodr’s implementation (Brennan-Prediger coefficient: 0.54 pre-pcodr vs. 0.78 post-pcodr; p = 0.002). Nationwide, the median number of days from Health Canada’s noc date to the date of funding significantly declined (to 393 days from 522 days, p < 0.001). Exploratory analyses excluding provinces with incomplete data did not change the results.Conclusions After the implementation of the pcodr, greater concordance in cancer drug funding decisions between provinces and decreased time to funding decisions were observed.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sotiris Vandoros ◽  
Alina Velias ◽  
Sotiris Georganas

Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, some countries have introduced early evening curfews. Several studies try measure the effectiveness of such measures across different countries, but clear identification of effects is elusive. Objective: We examined the impact of an early evening curfew on mobility by studying a shift in curfews from 9pm to 6pm in Greece. Data and Methods: We took advantage of a natural experiment in Greece, where curfews shifted from 9pm to 6pm in one Region, but not in another. We followed a difference-in-difference econometric approach, where we compared trends in mobility in groceries and pharmacies as well as residential spaces before and after the introduction of the 6pm curfew, in the two regions. Results: The relative difference in the time spent in groceries and pharmacies between the two regions before and after the intervention, is statistically insignificant [coeff: -9.95; 95%CI -44.358 to 24.458]. The relative increase in time spent in groceries and pharmacies after the 6pm curfew was only 4.625 percentage points [coeff: 4.625; 95%CI 1.412 to 7.838]. Conclusions: We found that the 6pm instead of 9pm curfew in Athens led to a 4.63 percentage point relative increase in time spent at home and had no effect on time spent in groceries and pharmacies. Considering that this was a result of a 18.75% reduction in hours where people were allowed to leave home, it seems that the early evening curfew led to more crowding in indoor spaces; which may facilitate the spread of disease. Lockdowns and other measures are necessary to tackle Covid-19, but it is important to avoid substitution by activities that contribute further to spreading the virus. Interventions should therefore be based on a thorough analysis of human behaviour.


2021 ◽  
pp. tobaccocontrol-2020-056160
Author(s):  
Yanhui Liao ◽  
Jinsong Tang ◽  
Ann McNeill ◽  
Brian C Kelly ◽  
Joanna E Cohen

BackgroundSharing and gifting cigarettes are common in China. These social practices promote cigarette consumption, and consequently may reduce quit rates in China. This study investigated sharing and gifting cigarettes, and the relationship of observing pictorial health warnings to attitudes towards sharing and gifting cigarettes in China.MethodsWe conducted an online nationwide cross-sectional study of 9818 adults in China. Experiences of sharing and gifting cigarettes, and attitudes towards sharing and gifting cigarettes before and after viewing text and pictorial health warnings on the packages were assessed, and compared between smokers and non-smokers.ResultsMost current smokers reported experiences of sharing (97%) and gifting (around 90%) cigarettes. Less than half of non-smokers reported sharing cigarettes and receiving gifted cigarettes, but over half (61.4%) gave cigarettes as a gift to others. More than half of non-smokers but less than 10% of smokers disagreed with sharing and gifting cigarettes. After observing both text and pictorial health warnings on the packages, disagreement with sharing and gifting cigarettes increased by more than 10 percentage points among both smokers and non-smokers.ConclusionHaving pictorial health warnings on cigarette packages may reduce sharing and gifting cigarettes in China.


2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordi Muñoz ◽  
Eva Anduiza

Social movements often face tactic diversification. In otherwise nonviolent movements, some groups or radical flanks may resort to violent actions such as street rioting. This article analyzes the impact that these violent episodes can have on popular support for the movement as a whole. To estimate the causal effect of violence, it exploits an unexpected riot outbreak that occurred during the fieldwork of a face-to-face survey in Barcelona in May 2016, led by a squat group linked to the anti-austerity movement known as the 15-M or indignados that emerged during the financial crisis. By comparing respondents interviewed before and after the riots, it finds that the street violence episode reduced support for the 15-M movement by 12 percentage points on average. However, the magnitude of the effect is highly conditional on the respondents’ predispositions towards the movement. Core supporters, that are expected to share the frame of the movement in justifying violent actions, are the least affected by the violent outbreak. On the other extreme, weak supporters, opposers, and non-aligned citizens reduce their support to a larger extent. Results are robust to different specifications and a wide range of robustness checks. These findings have potentially important implications for movements concerned with broadening their support base.


Paleobiology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 320-336
Author(s):  
Hannah L. Kempf ◽  
Ian O. Castro ◽  
Ashley A. Dineen ◽  
Carrie L. Tyler ◽  
Peter D. Roopnarine

AbstractA thorough understanding of how communities respond to extreme changes, such as biotic invasions, is essential to manage ecosystems today. Here we constructed fossil food webs to identify changes in Late Ordovician (Katian) shallow-marine paleocommunity structure and functioning before and after the Richmondian invasion, a well-documented ancient invasion. Food webs were compared using descriptive metrics and cascading extinction on graphs models. Richness at intermediate trophic levels was underrepresented when using only data from the Paleobiology Database relative to museum collections, resulting in a spurious decrease in modeled paleocommunity stability. Therefore, museum collections and field sampling may provide more reliable sources of data for the reconstruction of trophic organization in comparison to online data repositories. The invasion resulted in several changes in ecosystem dynamics. Despite topological similarities between pre- and postinvasion food webs, species loss occurred corresponding to a minor decrease in functional groups. Invaders occupied all of the preinvasion functional guilds, with the exception of four incumbent guilds that were lost and one new guild, corroborating the notion that invaders replace incumbents and fill preexisting niche space. Overall, models exhibited strong resistance to secondary extinction, although the postinvasion community had a lower threshold of collapse and more variable response to perturbation. We interpret these changes in dynamics as a decrease in stability, despite similarities in overall structure. Changes in food web structure and functioning resulting from the invasion suggest that conservation efforts may need to focus on preserving functional diversity if more diverse ecosystems are not inherently more stable.


2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 689-708 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hao Wang ◽  
Sanhong Deng

Purpose In the era of Big Data, network digital resources are growing rapidly, especially the short-text resources, such as tweets, comments, messages and so on, are showing a vigorous vitality. This study aims to compare the categories discriminative capacity (CDC) of Chinese language fragments with different granularities and to explore and verify feasibility, rationality and effectiveness of the low-granularity feature, such as Chinese characters in Chinese short-text classification (CSTC). Design/methodology/approach This study takes discipline classification of journal articles from CSSCI as a simulation environment. On the basis of sorting out the distribution rules of classification features with various granularities, including keywords, terms and characters, the classification effects accessed by the SVM algorithm are comprehensively compared and evaluated from three angles of using the same experiment samples, testing before and after feature optimization, and introducing external data. Findings The granularity of a classification feature has an important impact on CSTC. In general, the larger the granularity is, the better the classification result is, and vice versa. However, a low-granularity feature is also feasible, and its CDC could be improved by reasonable weight setting, even exceeding a high-granularity feature if synthetically considering classification precision, computational complexity and text coverage. Originality/value This is the first study to propose that Chinese characters are more suitable as descriptive features in CSTC than terms and keywords and to demonstrate that CDC of Chinese character features could be strengthened by mixing frequency and position as weight.


Author(s):  
Astrid Guttmann ◽  
Maria Chiu ◽  
Michael Lebenbaum ◽  
Kelvin Lam ◽  
Nelson Chong ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTObjectives Ontario, the most populous province in Canada, has a universal healthcare system that routinely collects health administrative data on its 13 million legal residents that is used for health research. Record linkage has become a vital tool for this research by enriching this data with the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Permanent Resident database and the Office of the Registrar General’s Vital Statistics-Death (VSD) registry. Our objectives were to estimate linkage rates and compare characteristics of individuals in the linked versus unlinked files. Approach We used both deterministic and probabilistic linkage methods to link the IRCC database (1985-2012) and VSD registry (1990-2012) to the Ontario’s Registered Persons Database. Linkage rates were estimated and standardized differences were used to assess differences in socio-demographic and other characteristics between the linked and unlinked records. Results The overall linkage rates for the IRCC database and VSD registry were 86.4% and 96.2%, respectively. The majority (68.2%) of the record linkages in IRCC were achieved after the three deterministic passes with the remaining 18.2% being linked probabilistically. Similarly the majority (79.8%) of the record linkages in the ORGD were linked using deterministic record linkage and the remaining 16.3% were linked after probabilistic and manual review. Unlinked and linked files were similar for most characteristics, such as age and marital status for IRCC and sex and most causes of death for VSD. However, lower linkage rates were observed among people born in East Asia (78%) in the IRCC database and certain causes of death in the VSD registry, namely perinatal conditions (61.3%) and congenital anomalies (81.3%). Conclusion The linkages of immigration and vital statistics data to existing population-based healthcare data in Ontario, Canada will enable many novel cross-sectional and longitudinal studies to be conducted. Analytic techniques to account for sub-optimal linkage rates may be required in studies of certain ethnic groups or certain causes of death among children and infants.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 482-499
Author(s):  
Ahfi Nova Ashriana

In this study, we analyzed the drivers of Total Shareholder Revenue (TSR) at commercial banks and evaluated whether non-adopter TSR performed better by Value-Based Management (VBM) banks. TSR models using data from 132 commercial banks registered in Europe and North America are estimated. First, we point out that banking institutions that have publicly implemented VBM in their MCS outperform non-VBM banks. VBM adopters produce annual TSR with an average of 5.8 percentage points. In terms of profitability, growth and liquidity, they also outperform non-VBM banks. Second, we note that banking companies concentrate on key performance indicators (KPIs) such as cost-of-income ratios which are suboptimal TSR indicators. We propose the implementation of indicators closer to TSR, such as asset repayment or the provision of loan losses. In their MCS, to date few banks have considered such KPIs (10 percent -45 percent). The shift to KPIs we propose can further improve the performance of VBM adopters. Our findings stabilized before and after the 2008 financial crisis when we monitored macroeconomic factors.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Borri ◽  
Francesco Drago ◽  
Chiara Santantonio ◽  
Francesco Sobbrio

In response to the Covid-19 outbreak, among other previous ``non-pharmaceutical interventions'', on March 22, 2020 the Italian Government imposed an economic lockdown and ordered the closing of all non-essential economic activities. This paper estimates the causal effect of this measure on mortality by Covid-19 and on mobility patterns. The identification of the causal effect exploits the variation in the number of active workers across municipalities induced by the economic lockdown. The difference-in-difference empirical design compares outcomes in municipalities above and below the median variation in the share of active population before and after the lockdown within a province, also controlling for municipality-specific dynamics, daily-shocks at the provincial level and municipal unobserved characteristics. Our results show that the intensity of the economic lockdown is associated to a statistically significant reduction in mortality by Covid-19 and, in particular, for age groups between 40-64 and older. Back of the envelope calculations indicate that 4,793 deaths were avoided, in the 26 days between April 5 to April 30, in the 3,518 municipalities which experienced a more intense lockdown. Assuming linearity, a 1 percentage point reduction in the share of active population caused a 1.32 percentage points reduction in mortality by Covid-19. We also find that the economic lockdown, as expected, led to a reduction in human mobility. Several robustness checks corroborate our empirical findings.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Senft ◽  
Evan Butler ◽  
Jordan Everson

BACKGROUND Public policy introduced since 2011 has supported provider adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) and patient-provider messaging, primarily through financial incentives. It is unclear how disparities in patients’ use of incentivized electronic health (eHealth) tools, like patient-provider messaging, have changed over time relative to disparities in use of eHealth tools that were not directly incentivized. OBJECTIVE This study examines trends in eHealth disparities before and after the introduction of US federal financial incentives. We compare rates of patient-provider messaging, which was directly incentivized, with rates of looking for health information on the Web, which was not directly incentivized. METHODS We used nationally representative Health Information National Trends Survey data from 2003 to 2018 (N=37,300) to describe disparities in patient-provider messaging and looking for health information on the Web. We first reported the percentage of individuals across education and racial and ethnic groups who reported using these tools in each survey year and compared changes in unadjusted disparities during preincentive (2003-2011) and postincentive (2011-2018) periods. Using multivariable linear probability models, we then examined adjusted effects of education and race and ethnicity in 3 periods—preincentive (2003-2005), early incentive (2011-2013), and postincentive (2017-2018)—controlling for sociodemographic and health factors. In the postincentive period, an additional model tested whether internet adoption, provider access, or providers’ use of EMRs explained disparities. RESULTS From 2003 to 2018, overall rates of provider messaging increased from 4% to 36%. The gap in provider messaging between the highest and lowest education groups increased by 10 percentage points preincentive (<italic>P</italic>&lt;.001) and 22 additional points postincentive (<italic>P</italic>&lt;.001). The gap between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites increased by 3.2 points preincentive (<italic>P</italic>=.42) and 11 additional points postincentive (<italic>P</italic>=.01). Trends for blacks resembled those for Hispanics, whereas trends for Asians resembled those for non-Hispanic whites. In contrast, education-based disparities in looking for health information on the Web (which was not directly incentivized) did not significantly change in preincentive or postincentive periods, whereas racial disparities narrowed by 15 percentage points preincentive (<italic>P</italic>=.008) and did not significantly change postincentive. After adjusting for other sociodemographic and health factors, observed associations were similar to unadjusted associations, though smaller in magnitude. Including internet adoption, provider access, and providers’ use of EMRs in the postincentive model attenuated, but did not eliminate, education-based disparities in provider messaging and looking for health information on the Web. Racial and ethnic disparities were no longer statistically significant in adjusted models. CONCLUSIONS Disparities in provider messaging widened over time, particularly following federal financial incentives. Meanwhile, disparities in looking for health information on the Web remained stable or narrowed. Incentives may have disproportionately benefited socioeconomically advantaged groups. Future policy could address disparities by incentivizing providers treating these populations to adopt messaging capabilities and encouraging patients’ use of messaging.


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