Elpidio Latorilla wrote:
About the PID concept, also named MPI, the following was taken from
the openhealth list:
State of the art may be in the eye of the beholder, but we have a
component out of which an MPI can be built. It is an implementation of
the Person Identification Service (PIDS) specification of the OMG.
... It is available at http://OpenEMed.org as part of the OpenEMed
Thanks for this. I will try to look into the said resource. The above passage
sounds to be more of a promotional ads than an info though
Probably it is. I was not endorsing as I (and my team) do not have any
experience with it.
I prefer to call it PID and to mean Person ID not Patient ID.
And you are right at that. Because any person may become a patient.
Unfortunately, there is no way, that I know of, to assure that a person
working in a hospital do not become a patient... :-)
So, in a hospital it does not make much sense to talk about patients and
personnel as if they were totally separated things. Also it does not
make much sense to talk about Person ID (to id patients) vs. Employee ID
(to id employees). Aren´t employees also persons? Also, in some
countries the concept of a person ID are either unlawful or not well
taken by those countries citizens.
So the general consensus seems to be to call any person that becomes a
user of a healthcare organization just... a USER.
Most of these persons are just users. They are healthy, they do not have
diseases, they are not patients and they do not go there to be treated.
That's why in many national healthcare systems the Patient IDs are
referred to as *UID*, meaning User ID.
Using anonymized data systems, global statistics can be made (not
only for healhcare related
matters).
Just think of the value of a real time, anonymized, database of clinical
data from a few million patients.
Just think on the value of that for scientific investigation and for the
progress of biomedical sciences.
And as a source of income: how much would pay, for instance, the
pharmaceutical industry for accurate and on time patient information?
I wish somebody could tell me why it was not considered a clever idea.
Lets say the first 4-digit group is exclusively for coding the
country where
It seems that VISA, among other tests also tried that and it showed to
be not practical.
I also wish that somebody could explain why it showed to be impractical.
I am afraid that, at this time, I cannot help you with that. Those are
very old news and one would have to dig documents from a couple of
decades ago. But we will have more on that bellow.
The link to the credit card anatomy showed that the first few digits are
related to ISO country standard.
Not really. We do not need large number theory to understand that ISO
country coding is not the most efficient way of coding regional
information. In fact neither VISA nor other Credit Card explicitly use
it. Instead they use a variation of the High-low strategy, i.e., the
identifier is formed by two logical parts: A unique HIGH value that you
obtain from a defined source and an N-digit LOW value that a second
entity locally assigns itself. Each time that a HIGH value is obtained
the LOW value will be set to zero.
Lets see the facts behind a VISA card number like 4207 1059 5473 7860:
1. The maximum length of a credit card number is 19 digits. VISA uses 16
digits.
2. The first digit of your credit card number is the Major Industry
Identifier (MII), which represents the category of entity which issued
your credit card.
0-ISO/TC 68 and other industry assignments, 1-Airlines, 2-Airlines and
other industry assignments, 3-Travel and entertainment, 4-Banking and
financial, 5-Banking and financial, 6-Merchandising and banking,
7-Petroleum, 8-Telecommunications and other industry assignments,
9-National assignment.
3. The first 6 digits of your credit card number (including the initial
MII digit) form the Issuer Identifier. This means that the total number
of possible Issuers is a million (10 raised to the sixth power, or
1,000,000).
4. Digits 7 to (n - 1) of your credit card number are your individual
account identifier. In VISA the maximum length of the account number
field is 16 - 7, or 9 digits. Each issuer therefore has 10 raised to the
9th power (or 1,000,000,000) possible account numbers.
5. The final digit of your credit card number is a check digit, akin to
a checksum. The algorithm used to arrive at the proper check digit is
called the Luhn algorithm, after IBM scientist Hans Peter Luhn
(1896-1964), who patented the technique in 1960.
As you see, it has more than 40 years... very old news indeed...
But it must be reliable, or it would not be used anymore.
Btw: I am very satisfied with VISA. (this is not an advertisement).
Me too. But in order for it to work in the health milieu it would be
needed a... VISA organization.
It would be something big... very global, very agile, very
professional... very rich. Perhaps
