Re: [Gnumed-devel] demographics.sql

[Karsten Hilbert]

> > Not guaranteed to be unique but more likely to be so compared
> > to last-first-DOB only.

> I'm not quite sure what we are talking about here. Is this
> thread about identification of patients as in "Mr. James Kirk,
> health-insurance-no ENTERCARE-2800-03" or "hong,chinese male, 2
> years old, long nose, nice mother" or are we talking about IDs
> (=numbers) used to identify patients across databases ? These
> are two different concepts, IMHO. I assume we are talking about
> the former but maybe you want to combine those two ...
Good point. I think we are talking about this:

1) gnumed-internal patient record primary key
   - this we got handled with identity.id
   - we use this inside one database for foreign keys
   - we do use it across services via xlnk_identity
   - we cannot, however, rely on the latter

2) to alleviate the latter in 1) we need
   - an identifier with meaning
   - for use across databases
   - suited to computation (eg. defined structure, not just
     arbitrary free text)
   - human readable, however
   - short, concise format
   - which to me is the GnuMed PUPIC

3) the GnuMed "internal" Patient ID
   - this is just some assigned identifier within one
     "GnuMed eChart system" handy for referring to patients
   - eg, the primary key of a patient can change across
     dump/reload of the entire database
   - the GnuMed internal Patient ID cannot, however
   - this is easily done via ext_person_id rows

> In Germany, in the majority of the cases, this will boil down
> to full_name, dob, place of birth, mothers name, german. The
> entropy of "country/place of birth" and ethnicity might be
> quite low in some settings (only local patients of same
> ethnicity.
So the order of importance is like this ?

1) full name at birth
2) date of birth in Gregorian Calendar
3) mothers name at birth of person

4) ethnicity
5) country of birth at time of birth

with 4 and 5 only really starting to be useful in countries
with high percentages of first-generation immigrants...

Ethnicity before country of birth since second-generation
immigrants are often still of original ethnicity but not of
different cob.

Comments ?  Should the results of this discussion be collected
in the Wiki ?

[arbitrary additional data field]
> Sounds good. Maybe in some countries this might be the only
> way to identify a patient, especially if there are no assigned
> numbers and the concept of different names and dob are not well
> established.
My experience from Thailand makes me suggest this, BTW.

Karsten
-- 
GPG key ID E4071346 @ wwwkeys.pgp.net
E167 67FD A291 2BEA 73BD  4537 78B9 A9F9 E407 1346