Health Care Digital Identity

Full Title

A means for creating Identifiers and references to Electronic Health Records for people seeking health care in the US.

Context

On March 4, CMS and ONC published two proposed rules in the Federal Register which requires the use of application programming interfaces (APIs) built with Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) to share both clinical and claims data with consumers, third-party applications, and others within the health care ecosystem. In order to do so, there is a need to solve for at least four specific problems:

1. ) How do we identify unique users across systems using person-centric mobile technologies?
2. ) How do we securely authenticate individuals across systems using modern, open standards?
3. ) Once a patient is identified at one organization, how do we cross-facility match a patient to their records?
4. ) What does a consumer-directed, electronic federated consent approach look like?

References

• OHN for HIT Draft Trust Exchange Framework