TASCET created the 'Unique Patient Identifier' to protect patients from data breaches.
Here are five points:
1. The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems and American Hospital Association praised the UPI.
2. They called for a system to safely exchange electronic health records.
3. The Identity Theft Resource Center recorded 109 million patient records compromised in breaches since January, 2015.
4. The stolen information is sold and resold, allowing criminals to switch valid and false information to create new identities.
5. In 2008, RAND Corp. released standards for the creation of a UPI. The team recommended that the identifier be unique and canonical, invariable, non-disclosing, verifiable, ubiquitous and limited in use to accessing health information.
"To be both unique and canonical, a patient identifier must prevent multiple patients from being assigned to the same patient identifier, while also ensuring that the same patient is not attributed to more than one identifier…," said Larry Aubol, CEO of TASCET.
