The 21st century has seen an enormous growth in emergency medical services (EMS) information technology systems, with corresponding accumulation of large volumes of data. Despite this growth, integration efforts between EMS-based systems and electronic health records, and public-sector databases have been limited due to inconsistent data structure, data missingness, and policy and regulatory obstacles. Efforts to integrate EMS systems have benefited from the evolving science of entity resolution and record linkage. In this chapter, we present the history and fundamentals of record linkage techniques, an overview of past uses of this technology in EMS, and a look into the future of record linkage techniques for integrating EMS data systems including the use of machine learning-based techniques.
Keywords: emergency department; emergency medical services; entity resolution; health information exchange; record linkage.