Hi all, while preparing some documents for the 2nd generation Care2x, I remembered the initial idea of a global PID. This should be an ID for a person which must be unique globally.
Does anyone know of any work on this, proposals, thesis, dissertations, or working protocols? I would be glad to know the links to the documents. Please let me know. Anyway, I noticed the VISA credit card system and its numbering system. Each number is global and is unique to an account, well, a person can have several accounts. But we can modify the idea to one-number-one-person system. Each number has 16 digits grouped in 4 digits: e.g. 6345 6655 0005 7789 To accomodate this, the pid field for care2x must be modified to 16 digits (which is very easy to do). Now, lets look further to putting some intelligence on the number: Lets say the first 4-digit group is exclusively for coding the country where the person was first registered. Should we use an ISO country numbering? I could not take the first 2 digits only because there are more than 100 countries, so lets take 4-digits. That would give us 9,999 possibilities which would mean many unused numbers. Also, to avoid problems with the 2-of-5 interlaced barcode format, the first digit should never be zero. So the number of the first person should look like this: 1001 0001 0000 0001 That would mean: country 1, hospital 1, person 1. The country coding should not be a problem, we just use the ISO standards. The second 4-digit group should be exclusive for coding the hospital in the country. This numbering should be done officially by some kind of official national standards commision (or something similar) of the country. The second group will allow for 9,999 hospitals in one country. Does anyone know of a country who has more than that number of hospitals? (or is likely to have more than that figure in the future?) The remaining 8 digits are to number the person. That will allow a maximum of 99,999,999 (almost 100 million) persons for each hospital. I admit the above is very simplistic. Please let me know of your opinion or own ideas. If VISA can do it for global credit system, why couldn't we for the healthcare system? Time for Care2x foundation to come? Thanks Elpidio ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id70&alloc_id638&op=click _______________________________________________ Care2002-developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/care2002-developers
