We're going to go out on a limb and guess that if you're interested in healthcare data exchange, you'll want to locate patient records. With Redox, you have some options for finding patients.
When you query an EHR system directly to search for a patient, the returned results are typically based on partial matching. This means that any patients that match one or more demographic data points can be returned.
Let’s say you search for a patient with demographics. You provide a name, birthdate, gender, and phone number for the patient. The EHR system locates a patient with the same name, birthdate, and gender, but there’s a different phone number listed. Based on partial matching, the EHR system still returns the record, along with any other records that have at least one matching data point.
In these cases, you want to include as much demographic information as possible so that you find the most probable patient matches.
When you query data on demand to search for a patient, the returned results are based on exact matching. This means that all fields must match your search criteria exactly.
So let’s go back to that example of searching with a patient's demographics, which include a name, birthdate, gender, and phone number. The EHR system locates a patient with the same name, birthdate, and gender, but there’s a different phone number listed. Based on exact matching, no results would be returned.
As you can imagine, this can get dicey if patients have different phone numbers, email addresses, or nicknames throughout different systems. Or, if different systems use nonidentical formats for any of these fields—for example, 555-555-0000 instead of (555) 555-0000 for a phone number—then they still won’t match.
Depending on your configuration, you could receive these kinds of results with exact matching:
Number of results | Scenario | Notes |
|---|---|---|
One | An exact match is returned. | |
A list of two or more | More than one exact match is found. | This is possible with data on demand for two patients with matching demographics or one patient with duplicate records. |
No results | No exact matches are found. | If using the Data Model API, the Patient[] array is empty. If using the FHIR® API, the search response bundle is empty. If this happens, we recommend the "less is more" philosophy. Take out extraneous demographic data and search for the patient with the most critical data points. |
A broader option for locating patient records is using our Network Onramps to join the nationwide Carequality Interoperability Framework. Redox relies on our record locator service to find the patient you're looking for.
However, searching a clinical network is a little different. For example, you won't get probabilisitic matching, but you'd be able to search for records throughout the entire Carequality Framework. The response would return multiple records from multiple sites for one matching patient.