On Fri, 2004-10-22 at 10:17, Andrew Ho wrote: > Right - of course, we still need a reliable way to > transfer/synchronize records between different doctors' offices, > hospitals, etc. MPI is exactly designed to serve that function - but > there are other ways to do it.
MPI's are designed to uniquely identify patients. They have nothing to do with record transfer/synchronization. The latter is a separate issue no matter which approach is used. The CCR in the US is supposed to solve that problem but they chose not to base it on any established standards (e.g. an HL7 CDA). The vendors I spoke to that have implemented it, said that even though it was adopted as an ASTM standard it is still rapidly changing and is impossible to keep up with at this point. Maybe the ASTM and HL7 will get together with a consensus standard for transferring patient summary data. The approaches are somewhat different at this point. The likely hood of full EMR transfer is isn't very good (IMHO)) and may not even be desired. Dr. Forslund has published in this area before. For those that haven't read this from four years ago: http://www.wma.net/e/publications/pdf/2000/forslund.pdf Later, Tim
