Patient Matching within a Health Information Exchange
The purpose of this article is to describe the patient matching problems resulting from the Nationwide Health Information Network’s automated patient discovery specification and propose a more effective and secure approach for patient matching between health information organizations participating in a health information exchange. This proposed approach would allow the patient to match his or her identity between a health information organization’s electronic health records (EHRs) at the same time the patient identifies which EHR data he or she consents to share between organizations.