Patient identifier

== Unified Patient Identifier (UPI) ==Obtaining patient data is a task seems to be easy, but when the data is distributed in different places such as clinical laboratories, Community pharmacies, radiology departments, free-standing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) centers, and the task will be more complicated and be more and more difficult when the patient went to another city[1]. So there is a need for unique national patient identifier for linking all patient data obtained from many sites, specially nowadays as every patient is likely to have multiple healthcare identifiers –a different patient number for each physician or hospital where he or she receives care, These multiple identifiers lead to fragmented medical records, duplicate tests, increased costs, delayed treatment and poor outcomes. Using UPI is become important and critical to help in effective use of Electronic Health Record (EHR) to enable the patient and his/her different provider to access the information regardless information system they use ,Collecting and integrating all medical information for each person easily with less errors in one place, UPI can be used as a supporting tool for search development so that the main 2 functions of UPI are individual identification and information identification UPI should meet some criteria such as being Canonical – everyone has only one UPI, Unique – no more than one person has the same identifier, not disclose any personal information, Permanent – will never be re‐used, Ubiquitous all citizen in the country have UPI [2]. For meaningful use of UPI there should be powerful technology infrastructure which includes computer systems, communication network and powerful software applications for managing and maintaining the database which contain UPIs and all data related to it But there some issue s which hider the adoption of UPI as the cost of this project, privacy and security issue and due to that some people refused the concept of UPI as they consider it may be a tool for disclosing their medical information once get the patient identifier number, some political also argue the idea of UPI as they say the project will cost a lot of money without a great benefit ,another solution for this problem may be using voluntary identifier the, the Voluntary Universal Healthcare Identifier (VUHID) model provides enhanced privacy protections that allow each individual to designate components of his or her medical record to be kept private or shared on a limited basis[3]. So I see VUHID will be good solution for making people accept the idea of UPI in optional way Refrance 1-Edward H. Shortliffe EditorJames J. Cimino Associate Editor, Biomedical Informatics Computer Application in Health Care and Biomedicine, Third Edition 2-http://www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/ last accessed 30/1/2010 3- http://www.healthcareitnews.com/blog/elephant-middle-room-need-national-patient-identifierThe Elephant in the Middle of the Room: The Need for a National Patient Identifier Last accessed February 26, 2009

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