The California Automated Mortality Linkage System (CAMLIS)

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Biostatistics
• Epidemiology

Background:

• The California Automated Mortality Linkage System (CAMLIS) was established in 1981 to aid follow-up studies in California.
• Effective death clearance is crucial for accurate epidemiological research and public health surveillance.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the performance of the California Automated Mortality Linkage System (CAMLIS) for death clearance.
• To compare CAMLIS's accuracy against traditional death clearance procedures.

Main Methods:

• CAMLIS utilizes a combination of deterministic and probabilistic linkage criteria.
• The system's performance was assessed using sensitivity and specificity metrics.
• Comparisons were made against the Social Security Administration, the National Death Index (NDI), and manual search procedures.

Main Results:

• CAMLIS demonstrated high specificity, with most evaluations exceeding 0.99, and one at 0.93.
• Sensitivity varied, with CAMLIS achieving 0.97 compared to 0.79 for the Social Security Administration.
• CAMLIS showed a sensitivity of 0.89 versus 0.94 for the NDI, and 0.92 versus 0.93 for a manual Japanese name search.
• Predictive values for CAMLIS ranged from 0.93 to 0.99, significantly higher than the NDI's 0.59.

Conclusions:

• CAMLIS provides a reliable method for death clearance in California.
• The system's performance is competitive with, and in some aspects superior to, established national and manual methods.
• CAMLIS offers high predictive value in identifying deceased individuals for research purposes.