Federal social security death index

In November , GenealogyBank removed social security numbers from their free U. Social Security Death Index database, after two customers complained their privacy was violated when the Social Security Administration falsely listed them as deceased.

Use The SSDI Search For Family History Research

Unfortunately, these restrictions weren't the end of the changes to public access to the Social Security Death Index. Genealogists and other individuals can no longer request copies of social security applications SS-5 for individuals who have died within the past three years under the Freedom of Information FOI Act. Recent deaths are also not included in the SSDI until three years after the date of death.

Share Flipboard Email. In the United States, specifically, it is difficult to determine mortality status due to multiple separate health and vital statistic databases at the local, state, and federal levels. Mortality measurement of very elderly patients may also be difficult. The DMF is made available via a secure website, with a variety of access options. The potential impact of this change on the utility of the DMF has been as source of concern for several years; however, to our knowledge, it has not been rigorously investigated.

We hypothesized that the change would greatly reduce the validity of the DMF as a source of mortality data. Medical admissions were not included in the cohort. Hospital date of death, discharge date, and discharge status were obtained from our institutional data warehouse. If a patient had multiple anesthetics during the study period, only the most recent anesthetic was considered. If the date of death was null and the discharge status indicated death, then date of death was set to the date of discharge, and the patient was also considered to have died in hospital. In fact, identifying death after discharge is one of the main motivations of using the DMF.

We have kept our local DMF file current by applying monthly updates as mandated by the subscriber agreement. The match was run on October 16, The linked dataset included date and cause of death, unique patient identifier, hospital name and unique facility identification number as well as admission and discharge dates, patient sex, date of births, and residency, primary and up to 24 secondary diagnoses, primary and up to 14 secondary procedures. A true positive was a DMF record found for a patient who died in hospital, while a false positive was a DMF record found for a patient who did not die in hospital.

A true negative was no DMF record for a patient who did not die in hospital, and a false negative was no DMF record for a patient who died in hospital. All false positives were manually checked via chart review. In addition, Cohen's kappa coefficient was calculated. This would simulate a hypothetical study with mortality as a primary endpoint. The curves are presented by cohort of patients discharged before and after November to emphasize the effect DMF change. The analysis was limited to New York State residents only with discharges on or before December 31, Statistical analysis was performed using R 3.

Overall patients died in hospital, 5.

Of them, 17 were matched directly on SSN; one case was matched on name. The sensitivity of the DMF dropped to The Kappa coefficient decreased to 0. The Kappa coefficient likewise remained very high at 0. Mortality data were available for NJ patients through December 31, Historically, the DMF was shown to be a reliable source of death data for elderly individuals, with 96 percent of deaths of patients over the age of 65 captured. The implications of this change have been a source of concern since at least The current study is the first to our knowledge to examine the effects of the change in the DMF using a very large cohort of general and specialty surgical cases.

Certification requires that a researcher demonstrates a legitimate purpose to access DMF data, and has systems and procedures to secure the data.

This extra layer of requirements creates more barriers to research use of the DMF. Lack of data results in reported survival that is artificially higher and reduces the number of true deaths in any study. With fewer deaths, effect size is smaller, and the power of a study to find a true difference between groups is reduced. The DMF is used not only for research but also by hospitals for quality, safety, and performance monitoring.

While there are alternative sources of death data for patients in the United States, few offer the broad coverage of the DMF.

History of Social Security

State and local vital records may be difficult or impossible to obtain for researchers in different localities. Commercial obituary record agencies such as ObituaryData. The Centers for Disease Control National Death Index NDI is a centralized database of death records that can be used for research studies, but not for administrative tasks. Requests are expensive, must be submitted via mail on a compact disk, and have a long turnaround time. Other US death data sources are restricted to subpopulations. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services CMS includes vital status in data extracts, but these extracts cannot be used to query for a specific patient.

In contrast to the DMF, local state databases likely remain a reliable source of death data. There is often also a significant lag time for release of death date. An interesting finding in our study was that the number of available SSNs in our dataset declined by about 15 percent between the two periods. The Social Security Number has become a fixture of American life since the first cards were issued in The near universality of the number among Americans adults has led the SSN to become a de facto national identification number.

However, concern over the SSN's use in varied contexts and the rise of identity theft have created a strong push at governmental and commercial levels to eliminate the use of SSNs as identifiers. The current Medicare identifier is based on the patient's SSN and will be replaced with a new identifier starting in April Our analysis was limited to data from a single tertiary care center, and the majority of the patients were residents of a single state New York.

It is possible that other states might have more permissive death data use agreements with the SSA and that DMF data would be more reliable for those states. This is unlikely given that the changes made to the DMF were done at the federal level. We are unable to speculate on the source of this decline since we did not examine cause of death or severity of illness.

While this will no doubt increase the coverage of the DMF, the full impact of the addition of these records remains to be seen.