In International Patient Summary (IPS), how is it expected to uniquely identify a cross-border Patient?
To elaborate, IATA has a way to track all passengers across the globe. How can the healthcare systems do that?
I'm unable to figure this from hl7 documentation and implementation guides. Any help is appreciated.
That's a good question. There certainly isn't anything like a "global MPI" that's available, of course, and I think your question fairly points out that we haven't explicitly provided a solution for this in the IPS and our other HL7 specifications. For "international" use in the patient summary and specifically for supporting cross (national) border patient care, I don't think that we can give an absolutely definitive answer, but I think that there are some reasonable ways that we should be able to deal with this issue. I'm thinking of two in particular at the moment. The first is that in cases where there is dedicated organization and infrastructure (I'm thinking of something like the European cross-border services) then it may well be possible to provide some type of MPI service(s) that can establish and verify identity across the jurisdictional boundaries (and I'm not saying that for sure this actually exists in Europe or anywhere else, but just that it may be possible to do). The second, which I expect will turn out to be the more common and useful case overall, is that the patient is the ultimate owner of his or her data, so if the patient transports and provides the data directly to the receiving clinician (e.g., via their mobile device) then that should be more than sufficient to establish the identity. In that case the provenance and reliability of the data may still need to be considered, but that is a different question. Hopefully that may help a little! It is something that I agree we probably will need to address further in future versions of the IPS.
Rob
