Secondary Databases in Equine Research. Data quality and disease measurements. Doctoral thesis SLU

disease measurements Knowledge on disease occurrence in the Swedish equine population is lacking. Secondary data (data not produced primarily for research) including medical information offer potential to investigate disease occurrence in populations without primary data collection. This thesis explored the potential use of two nation-wide secondary equine databases for research on diseases in the Swedish horse population. The data quality in one insurance database and one database from a national equine clinic network was evaluated. For diagnostic information, the agreement in insurance data was 84 % whereas the completeness (proportion of problems in the clinical records recorded in the database) and correctness (proportion of recorded disease events in the database truly occurring) of clinic data was 91 % and 92%, respectively. Logistic regression showed that agreement/correctness was significantly associated with type of visit (clinic data and veterinary care claims in insurance data), whether diagnostic codes were present in the clinical record and affected syste