Patient registries, for example, often use electronic data capture tools to collect and manage their data. Large amounts of electronic health care data are also being generated from clinical research. 4 This number is likely to increase significantly in response to the EHR incentive programs enacted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which “provide a financial incentive for the ‘meaningful use’ of certified EHR technology to achieve health and efficiency goals.” 5 In addition to office-based EHRs, electronic health care data may be created by hospital EHRs, billing systems, insurance claims systems, pharmacy record systems, medical devices, and even by patients themselves via electronic patient health record systems.

EHRs are increasingly being used to generate electronic health care data-72 percent of office-based physicians in the United States now use some form of EHR. The quantity of electronic health care data continues to grow. The need for PIM strategies in the realm of health care data is rising, primarily because of the continued increase in the quantity and linkage of electronic health care data.

2 A related idea is the concept of patient identity integrity, which is defined as “the accuracy and completeness of data attached to or associated with an individual patient.” 3 Efficient patient identity management leads to high patient identity integrity. ” 1 For the purposes of this chapter, the scope of this definition will be expanded to refer to PIM as the process of accurately and appropriately identifying, tracking, managing, and linking individual patients and their digitized health care information, often within and across multiple electronic systems. Patient identity management (PIM) has been defined as the “ability to ascertain a distinct, unique identity for an individual (a patient), as expressed by an identifier that is unique within the scope of the exchange network, given characteristics about that individual such as his or her name, date of birth, gender. Efforts to address this challenge are complicated by the need to protect patient privacy and security. This makes it difficult to track patients across multiple systems and identify duplicate patients when different systems are linked. In general, every system assigns its own identifier to each patient whose data it maintains. Electronic health care data are increasingly being generated and linked across multiple systems, including electronic health records (EHRs), patient registries, and claims databases.

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