Are you you? managing patient identities in the public health context

Disease registries such as immunization information systems (IIS) are at the leading edge of health record data exchanges and data interoperability. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and HITECH Acts advance the technologies needed to support state and national public health registry programs, but managing patient identifies can be tricky. Records originating from different systems need to be managed in such a way to reduce data duplication and errors. In early 2013, CDC published a two volume report patient-level record identity management and de-duplication. This session provides a summary of the results from their national practice assessment along with a discussion of important implications for public health technology selection and support including SOAP, HL7, Master Patient Indexes, and integrating IIS into HIE and NHIN operations.