Common Key Service - MiHIN

The Common Key Service (CKS) use case provides a consistent and reliable way to match patients with their electronic health information across multiple organizations, applications, and services. One of the most important goals of sharing patient information electronically is helping doctors build complete, current pictures of their patients using health information from multiple sources. These sources can include other doctors or specialists, hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, skilled nursing facilities and any other healthcare setting where care is provided. Enabling doctors to gather the details to build these complete patient pictures requires accurate �patient-matching� to make sure electronic health information from outside sources is attached to the correct patient. These patient-matching challenges can cause higher healthcare costs and lower care quality in many ways. When a patient�s health information is shared among doctors who use different systems, a lot of effort is needed to find and evaluate variations and identify the correct patient in each health information system. Errors can and do occur, meaning the wrong information can be matched to a patient.