Generating Unique Patient Id

Nathaniel and Pam has raised issue about the unique identifier of patients and how that may be made consistent if the students patient records are not online in one central DB.

Unique patient identifier is the holy grail of health infromatics. Even countries with national identifiers like HK and Singapore still grapple with this problem (eg, did not bring card to emergency room). The ideal solution is biometric but we are far from that.

In the ffehr, there shd be a field called local_hosp_case_number which is manually entered by the student. This is the hospital assigned unique number. But ffehr really uses its own internally generated UID for all of its operations. The local_hosp_case_number is just to assure that the students does not create two duplicate records for the same patient on his/her machine.

Fri Nov 09 01:23:00 2007 - nbjayme (quoted from Alvin Marcelo's email to the project dev's mailing list.)

Pam: Yes, I agree with Dr. Marcelo that there should be a separate field where the hospital's pre-assigned case number is input. The internally generated unique ID will possibly have conflicts once the students start turning over the patients. To quote the gmail discussion:

There is a single electronic record of the patient that exists at any one time. It is with a student in charge. Thus, it is already happening in the present system that only one electronic record exists at any one time. At a time this student has to shift out of the department, which usually happens every 2 weeks, such electronic record of the patient is passed on to the next student. So we're looking here at a setting where you have many many many autonomous holders of electronic data that do not have to interact at any one time. The interaction only happens during shifting and that is where there might be conflicts with the sequence type unique number. The new student in charge would have to import the data of the patient from an outgoing student. I SUGGEST, that with this importation, the data is treated as a new record and is assigned a sequence type unique number as in a new record.