Julian Drape, NineMSN
“Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon has hit back at critics of the “opt-in” system for setting up individual electronic health records, saying people shouldn’t have to make the switch before they are ready.
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Gary Culliton, Irish Medical Times
“Recommendations for ‘unique health identifiers’ for healthcare practitioners and organisations have been issued by the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA).
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Don Fluckinger, SearchHealthIT
“My name is Don Fluckinger. My pals and work colleagues will likely confirm that I am, er, a unique individual.
Last I checked, I’m the only Don Fluckinger on Facebook, which makes me a popular guy, a conduit for all the John Smiths I went to school with looking to friend our mutual pal Jim Johnson, but who can’t figure out which one of the thousands Jim Johnsons on Facebook is the right one (or is he James? Or does he still go by his high school nickname, “Flock of Seagulls?”) — until they friend me and access my friend list. Ditto for LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media sites.
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Robert Rowley, EHR Bloggers
“A person’s health picture is a fragmented, broken mirror, when you look across our archaic paper-based landscape. According to a survey we did last year, patients recall seeing over 19 different physicians in their lifetime, underscoring the reality that each place where health data is stored (each physician’s office) represents a piece of the whole picture.
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Howard Anderson, Healthcare Info Security
“As CIO of a hospital system that’s participating in an emerging health information exchange, Neal Ganguly is frustrated by the nation’s lack of a standard method for identifying patients.
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David Hastoglis, Healthcare IT Solutions
“As we mentioned in an earlier post about Tracking a Single Patient in a Connected Healthcare Environment, the key to making an integrated healthcare system work is identifying and managing a unique patient identifier that can be used to connect one patient across a diverse network of care providers.
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Jeffrey Roman, Healthcare Info Security
“A pilot project at a Southern California health information exchange is testing whether patient identifiers can make it easier to match patients to their records from multiple organizations.
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Howard Anderson, Healthcare Info Security
“The executive director of a Southern California health information exchange describes a pilot project that’s testing whether patient identifiers make it easier to match patients to their records from multiple organizations.
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Healthcare IT News
“The Western Health Information Network (WHIN) has received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio for a pilot project to test how unique patient identifiers can increase patient control over their clinical information and improve the quality of medical records.
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Daloni Carlisle, e-Health Insider
“Fewer than half of NHS trusts have successfully “pseudonymised” their patient records, missing a government target aimed at making patient data more secure.
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Suzanne Tindal, and Luke Hopewell, CNET Australia
“The Department of Health and Ageing (DOHA) today outed its draft operational blueprint for the development, implementation and ongoing operation of personally controlled e-health records (PCEHR).
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Anna Caldwell, The Courier-Mail
“Patients will be able to control their most sensitive health details and, for the first time, read their doctor’s secret medical notes.
The reforms, designed to empower patients, will be detailed today in a blueprint for the Gillard Government’s controversial electronic health system.
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Quantin C et al, BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 11(1)
As patients often see the data of their medical histories scattered among various medical records hosted in several health-care establishments, the purpose of our multidisciplinary study was to define a pragmatic and secure on-demand based system able to gather this information, with no risk of breaching confidentiality, and to relay it to a medical professional who asked for the information via a specific search engine.
Scattered data are often heterogeneous, which makes the task of gathering information very hard. Two methods can be compared: trying to solve the problem by standardizing and centralizing all the information about every patient in a single Medical Record system or trying to use the data as is and find a way to obtain the most complete and the most accurate information. Given the failure of the first approach, due to the lack of standardization or privacy and security problems, for example, we propose an alternative that relies on the current state of affairs: an on-demand system, using a specific search engine that is able to retrieve information from the different medical records of a single patient.
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Finney JM et al, BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 11(1)
BACKGROUND:
Integration of information on individuals (record linkage) is a key problem in healthcare delivery, epidemiology, and “business intelligence” applications. It is now common to be required to link very large numbers of records, often containing various combinations of theoretically unique identifiers, such as NHS or social security numbers, which are both incomplete and error-prone.
METHODS:
We describe a two-step record linkage algorithm in which identifiers with high cardinality are identified or generated, and used to perform an initial exact match based linkage. Subsequently, the resulting clusters are studied and, if appropriate, partitioned using a graph based algorithm detecting erroneous identifiers.
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Quantin C et al, International Journal of Medical Informatics, 2010
Purpose
The purpose of our multidisciplinary study was to define a pragmatic and secure alternative to the creation of a national centralised medical record which could gather together the different parts of the medical record of a patient scattered in the different hospitals where he was hospitalised without any risk of breaching confidentiality.
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Karen Dearne, The Australian
“The Senate community affairs budget estimates hearing ran over time and Medicare’s attendance was cancelled.
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Delimiter
“The nation’s peak e-health group has released a comprehensive set of documents that outline how the Federal Government’s $466.7 million electronic health record/health identifier project will be implemented over the coming years, and how it will work in practice.
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Josh Taylor, ZDNet.com.au
“Residents of Brisbane, Melbourne and the Hunter Valley will be the very first to get electronic health records, Health Minister Nicola Roxon has announced today.
“This is an important step forward in allowing online access to health records for each Australian that chooses to,” Roxon said in a statement. “Patients will control what goes onto their record and who can access their information.”
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Tim Lohman, Computerworld
“The National e-Health Transition Authority (NeHTA) is claiming a milestone in the advancement of a national e-health system with the first live implementation of the Australian Medicines Terminology (AMT).
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David More, Australian Health Information Technology
“What is most important – other than the obvious point that Medicare can’t seem to actually control its employees – is that the last four paragraphs reveal just how little has actually been achieved in the implementation of the Health Identifier Service, and how spectacularly expensive it seems to have been so far – for so little apparent progress.
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