Linkage of medical administrative claims and long-term care claims in DeSC database

The DeSC database, launched in 2020 by DeSC Healthcare Co., Ltd. is a commercially available Japanese administrative medical claims and health checkup database. Recently, long-term care insurance (LTCI) claims data-covering care-need levels, monthly care benefits, service utilization, and cost information-have been integrated into the database. We showed that the distributions of the seven care-need levels were highly similar between the DeSC database and the official report by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. This similarity supports the representativeness and reliability of the DeSC database for epidemiological analyses using care-need status, particularly in the Advanced Elderly Medical Service System. This integrated dataset bridges critical information gaps and offers substantial advantages for health services research and epidemiological studies through individual-level linkage of medical, pharmacy, and LTCI claims. This study provides an overview of the LTCI claims data and available data items in the DeSC database and discusses future research prospects, with a particular focus on the linkage between medical and LTCI claims.