Submitted By: Julie Maas / EMR Direct | |
---|---|
Data Element Information | |
Use Case Description(s) | |
Use Case Description | identifiers will be used both in organization to organization and in consumer-directed healthcare queries in which single high confidence person matches are needed. This may be for healthcare purposes though use beyond healthcare is permitted, when authorized. An individual can control the use of the identifier in consumer-directed workflows and identity services implementing the identifier may share it with the individual’s consent. Typical use cases include: • Patient registration, check-in, and access to portal or FHIR data • Cross-system patient matching for treatment or other permitted purpose • Patient Request purpose of use or Individual Access point to point or broadcast query • Network-wide opt-in or -out of information services • Audit log curation and access by a patient • Access to health data and authorization of data sharing with third parties, via a credential bound to the identifier; credentials can be provisioned and retired as needed • Identity services implementing the standard may offer its use outside healthcare settings, whenever strong authentication and/or identity assurance is needed, or simply to reduce the number of secure credentials an individual needs to maintain—reducing the likelihood of account compromise related to security fatigue and generally reducing instances of identity theft while increasing confidence in the identity of the individual on the other side of a transaction • Numerous other privacy-preserving use cases in which a high assurance, secured (if an associated credential is desired by the individual) Digital Identity is available for passive (as permitted by law—i.e. patient match in a B2B records request for payment purpose) and permissioned use (sharing verified PII with a third party when authorized) |
Estimate the breadth of applicability of the use case(s) for this data element | Due to the ability for identifiers to be passively assigned at industry standard identity assurance levels, most industry stakeholders would be capable of implementing this identifier and would likely upgrade their enterprise identifiers or local database indexes to reflect unique individuals. Those implementers could be expected to include health care insurers (>1,800), third-party application developers, Credential Service Providers, healthcare provider organizations (300K), and all US consumers (>320M). |
Link to use case project page | https://confluence.hl7.org/display/PA/Patient+Matching+PSS |
Healthcare Aims |
|
Maturity of Use and Technical Specifications for Data Element | |
Applicable Standard(s) | A system exists for using the identifier within HL7 FHIR transactions, particularly those invoking $match, but the standard also intends for the identifier to be used in other health information exchange transaction types as well as in non-healthcare specific transactions for example in OpenID Connect identity claims. http://hl7.org/fhir/us/identity-matching/NamingSystem/Identity-HL7-Identifier |
Additional Specifications | HL7 Interoperable Digital Identity and Patient Matching Implementation Guide (http://hl7.org/fhir/us/identity-matching/ImplementationGuide/hl7.fhir.us.identity-matching) |
Current Use | In limited use in test environments only |
Extent of exchange | N/A |
Potential Challenges | |
Restrictions on Standardization (e.g. proprietary code) | N/A |
Restrictions on Use (e.g. licensing, user fees) | N/A |
Privacy and Security Concerns | Addressed in the Implementation Guide. |
Estimate of Overall Burden | This is difficult to estimate although systems likely create identifiers meeting this bar already; the initiative to step up identity assurance practices and manage records based on identities is expected to have cost savings in prevention of patient safety issues resulting from erroneous matches and in saving some cost of re-verifying patient identity when a reusable, strong assurance digital identity credential is available. |
Data used to categorize individuals for identification, records matching, and other purposes.
Data Element |
||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
HL7-Identifier
Description
Globally unique identifier assigned to a patient by an organization asserting compliance with the referenced HL7 FHIR Identify Matching IG |
||||||||||||
|
Comment