Healthcare services across China – on implementing an extensible universally unique patient identifier system

A basic requirement to provide patient-centric care is to have identifiers serve to link all patient data across multiple systems together to provide a coherent service. In most hospitals today, the lack of a unique patient identifier that works across multiple hospital information systems such as HIS, LIS, PACS, and others means that healthcare providers typically rely on a patient’s name, date of birth, and other personal information to identify their medical records in the electronic health record systems. However, this information is not guaranteed to be unique to an individual. It also takes considerable amount of time to check on this or more information and requires much human intervention. As a result, providers often have a difficult time properly identifying patients, thus increase the risk of associating medical information with a wrong patient.