A Methodology to Create Mother-Baby Dyads Using Data From the Pediatric Health Information System

Linking newborn birth records with maternal delivery data is invaluable in perinatal research, though linkage is often challenging or impossible in the context of administrative data. Using data from the Pediatric Health Information System (PHIS), we describe a novel methodology to link maternal delivery data with newborn birth hospitalization records to form mother-baby dyads.

We extracted singleton birth discharges and maternal delivery discharges between 2016 and 2020 from hospitals submitting large volumes of maternal delivery discharges and newborn deliveries into PHIS. Birth discharges at these PHIS hospitals included routine births and those requiring specialty care. Newborn discharges were matched to maternal discharges within hospital by date of birth, mode of delivery, and ZIP code.

We identified a matching maternal discharge for 92.1% of newborn discharges (n = 84 593/91 809). Within-hospital match rates ranged from 87.4% to 93.9%. Within the matched cohort, most newborns were normal birth weight (91.2%) and term (61.2%) or early term (27.4%). A total of 88.8% of newborns had birth stays less than 5 days and 14.2% were admitted to the NICU.

We demonstrate the feasibility of deterministically linking maternal deliveries to newborn discharges forming mother-baby dyads with a high degree of success using data from PHIS. The matched cohort may be used to study a variety of neonatal conditions that are likely to be affected by maternal demographic or clinical factors at delivery. Validation of this methodology is an important next step and area of future work.