202 Discrete Event Simulation for Health Technology Assessment
An important problem with routinely collected data, especially those obtained
for administrative purposes, is that records are maintained on people only
while they are covered by the insurer that is interested in the data. In settings
where there is little or no movement among insurers (ideally where there is
only a single payer), this is not a problem. When people change their insurer
with some frequency, the records may be very incomplete. Indeed, a single per-
son may be represented multiple times but with no link between one record
and the next. To mitigate this problem, criteria requiring a minimum duration
in the database are usually imposed (Berger et al. 2009; Cox et al. ...