Chronic disease prevalence from Italian administrative databases in the VALORE project: A validation through comparison of population estimates with general practice databases and national survey

Background Administrative databases are widely available and have been extensively used to provide estimates of chronic disease prevalence for the purpose of surveillance of both geographical and temporal trends. There are, however, other sources of data available, such as medical records from primary care and national surveys. In this paper we compare disease prevalence estimates obtained from these three different data sources.