NIA supports several longitudinal studies of older populations that serve as key infrastructure to behavioral and social for grantees and the federal government. These studies benefit from access to timely death records to determine which respondents have passed away so survey/trial participants can be efficiently tracked. Death records also enable researchers to follow-up with surviving family members to gather information on end-of-life planning and confirm age reports. The Social Security Administration Death Master File (DMF) has historically been a timely and comprehensive source of fact-of-death data accessible by the survey research and clinical trial community. However, in November 2011 it was learned that details in the Social Security Act restricted access to the complete DMF, prohibiting SSA from disclosing state provided death records. The National Death Index created by the National Center for Health Statistics, though valuable and comprehensive is more expensive and cumbersome for researchers to conduct searches with and the data are not updated as regularly as the DMF, making it an inferior source for some types of research. NIA has contract with CNSTAT to conduct a planning meeting on research access to death records. The meeting will explore the ways to improve research access to comprehensive and timely fact-of-death data and focus on ways to make the system more cost-effective and accessible for research purposes.
