People actively involved in developing HL7 compliant applications may find some issues on duplicate records caused by typos or inaccurate information. All these problems go back to the software developers who seem to hold all the responsibilities of creating such dilemma. On the one hand, people who do the data entry should share part of responsibilities in making wrong records. On the other hand, The patients may also provide inaccurate information about their identities. Finally, all these errors could make the patients suffering when medical staff makes wrong decisions based on the incorrect information produced by the software during treatment.
Medicare number is not a good choice for patient identification. You may agree with that after you read this:
Why not use the Medicare number?
A Medicare number is not unique. Some people have more than one Medicare number because they are members of more than one family and may be on multiple cards. Also, not everyone who needs healthcare will have a Medicare number.
So what is individual healthcare identifier?
An IHI is a unique 16 digit number that will be allocated to each Australian resident and others seeking healthcare in Australia. Your IHI will be unique and only apply to you for use in health information records alongside your name and date of birth. No clinical information will be linked to your identifier. Healthcare providers and healthcare organisations will also have their own unique identifiers.
An unique identifier would really help ease the pain of the application developers in Australia. For successful e-health strategy, health institution will need to use HL7 for orchestration among the systems maintained by different vendors. Patient identification causes big trouble to the developers whereas most of them find their own ways to identify an unique patient's record. With both of healthcare identifier and HL7 protocol, various systems can really talk to each others with less errors than ever before.
An exposure draft of Healthcare Identifiers Bill has been released and is ready for public comment. This will help build the basic infrastructure of e-health communication protocol. Hopefully, we will see Healthcare Identifiers Service offered by Medicare by mid-year 2010.
http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/pacd-ehealth-consultation
