Review on Master Patient Index

TL;DR

This paper reviews the concept of a Master Patient Index (MPI), highlighting its role in improving healthcare data interoperability by centralizing and unifying patient records across diverse health information systems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of MPI, discussing its importance, structure, and benefits in addressing data inconsistencies and enhancing healthcare data management.

Findings

MPI reduces duplicate patient records.

MPI improves data consistency and accuracy.

MPI facilitates better healthcare data interoperability.

Abstract

In today's health care establishments there is a great diversity of information systems. Each with different specificities and capacities, proprietary communication methods, and hardly allow scalability. This set of characteristics hinders the interoperability of all these systems, in the search for the good of the patient. It is vulgar that, when we look at all the databases of each of these information systems, we come across different registers that refer to the same person; records with insufficient data; records with erroneous data due to errors or misunderstandings when inserting patient data; and records with outdated data. These problems cause duplicity, incoherence, discontinuation and dispersion in patient data. With the intention of minimizing these problems that the concept of a Master Patient Index is necessary. A Master Patient Index proposes a centralized repository, which indexes all patient records of a given set of information systems. Which is composed of a set of demographic data sufficient to unambiguously identify a person and a list of identifiers that identify the various records that the patient has in the repositories of each information system. This solution allows for synchronization between all the actors, minimizing incoherence, out datedness, lack of data, and a decrease in duplicate registrations. The Master Patient Index is an asset to patients, the medical staff and health care providers.