On Thursday 16 May 2002 02:23, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > But to raise the ongoing issue, how do we ever get to determine a uniform > identifier that can be attached to a patient's medical record/chart if we > don't come to some determining of a format for that identifier.
I think there are two problems being attacked with one approach in the FUPI. > If for instance the Stamford IPA physicians, at least a group of them, all > independent business men and women with solo, group practices decide to use > a central enterprise server a more definitive way to come up with a > Enterprise Universal Patient Identifier needs to be coordinated amongst all > those separate entities. > That is the only way to assure that demographics on the same patients don't > get entered more than one, or at least it is what the goal should be. The two problems are to geenrate a usable unique ID for an individual, and to make it easy to get the individuals notes when they turn up. The two are slightly different, and I'd suggest the latter is a more pressing problem and one adequately or excellently solved by FUPI. However FUPI's namespace may be some orders of magnitude larger than required for that... It will also be made easier and more satisfactory to a minority o patients, if you abandon _birth_ name in favour of current name... this leads to problms in uniqueness of course. The other problem is approachable in several ways, but best handled by an arbitrary identifier with no state information embedded in it, going back to an index. Whether that should be allowed is not universally agreed, of course, and particularly Germany and Holland are likely to object to the idea for reasons going back to some common history they share. -- From one of the Linux desktops of Dr Adrian Midgley http://www.defoam.net/
