Data source
We derived the real-world data of this prospective cohort study from
Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD). NHIRD is
an administrative database from Taiwan’s National Health Insurance (NHI)
program, the country’s compulsory and single-payer national health
insurance system. The NHI program covers almost all outpatient visits,
emergency room services, admission services, medical care services, and
medications. Services include physician diagnosis, blood tests like
biochemistry and complete blood count, imaging studies like chest X-rays
and computed tomography, medication, and surgery. The bureau of the NHI
released the NHIRD for research purposes. In this study, we adopted the
data obtained through the Longitudinal Health Insurance Database 2005
(LHID 2005) from the NHIRD. This LHID 2005 database included
registration and medical claims for 1,000,000 randomly sampled patients
from the total number of NHRI enrollees. The LHID2005 data set allows
researchers to follow up on all the medical services utilized by these
1,000,000 individuals since the start of the NHI in 1995.
This study was approval by the Chang Gung Medical Foundation’s
Institutional Review Board (IRB No.: 201600763B1).