Objective: Significant opportunities for understanding the co-occurrence of conditions across species in coincident households remain untapped. We determined the feasibility of creating a Companion Care Registry (CCR) for analysis of health data from the University of Colorado Health (UCHealth) patients and their companion animals who received veterinary care at the geographically-adjacent Colorado State University Veterinary Health System (CSU-VHS).
Materials and methods: Overall populations of the institutions were compared. Using a hybrid deterministic and probabilistic record linkage method, non-medical Personally Identifiable Information was securely matched to determine the total number of UCHealth patients within the HIPAA-compliant Health Data Compass Research Data Warehouse (2015-2024) who took a companion animal to the CSU-VHS (2019-2024).
Results: 12 115 matches were identified, indicating 29% of CSU-VHS clients were UCHealth patients.
Discussion: The overlap between CSU-VHS clients and UCHealth patients underscores the potential feasibility and utility of a CCR.
Conclusion: This work provides a mechanism to evaluate environmental and inter-species influences on One Health.
Keywords: One Health; data governance; data linkage; electronic health record; personally identifiable information.
© The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association.