Medical Records Identifier
Contents
Purpose
Any person can go into any willing medical provider's office and be identified and get care appropriate to their medial history.
Goals
- There are many cases where a patient presents themselves to a medical provider seeking care. The goal is that they will have some single identifier that they can use to recover their medical history.
- Clearly there will be lots of locations were medical records are retained. That will not change soon. This goal is that a single identifier can mediate access to all EHI.
- Clearly there will be some sort of sort of Bootstrapping Identity and Consent that gets patient registered for this service, this paper will consider 3:
- The user has a Medicare number of the form US:CMS:32fs-233ii-9r38 that is already well-known to the medical community.
- The user comes with some Identifier that is not previously know to the provider, perhaps self-issued for cases where they chose to take control of their own medical records recovery.
- The user comes with no usable Identifier. For this use case we consider the case of a homeless child under the age of 13 being registered for school.
Problems
- The big problem with any sort of Self-issued Identifier is Trust where there are no standards or examples of any trust without a history of trusted behavior.
Solutions
Universal Resolver
The US medical community accepts the idea that any registered health care provider can query a Universal Resolver and get a response with data appropriate to their need and authority within 2 minuets for emergency care and within 2 hours for more detailed records.
1 Well-known Patients
The Medicare system is well known to all medical care providers. It is not a requirement that the provider accept medicate payments, but it is required that they participate in the Universal Resolver for medical information, including information that they generate themselves.
2 Patients with unfamiliar Identifiers
The Universal Resolver must be extensible so that new entrants to the medical records business have a process by which they can be included in the medical records system. One of the requirements will include the ability and authority to reach out to other medical record centers.
3 Dependent patients with no Identifier
References
