The Identification Service in Health Information Exchange

Regional health information exchange (HIE) is becoming the focus of health information technology in China. According to Chinese administration properties and specific requirements, the HIE adopts a centralized architecture, in which the clinical documents are stored and exchanged in a centralized platform. To integrate all the clinical information of a patient, it is critical to identify the patient in the HIE domain uniquely. In this paper, an identification service based on IHE PIX profile is designed and implemented. We selected the resident ID card number as the Master Patient Identifier (MPI) to setup cross-reference and designed a match algorithm for clinical documents from various healthcare institutions. Our design provides a viable solution for the regional HIE platform in China.