A Distributed Patient Identification Protocol Based on Control Numbers with Semantic Annotation

One important problem of information systems in health care is the localisation and access to electronic patient records across health care institute boundaries, especially in an international setting. The complexity of the problem is increased by the absence of a globally accepted standard for electronic health care records, the absence of unique patient identifiers in most countries, and the strict data protection requirements that apply to clinical documents. This article describes a protocol that allows the identification of locations of patient records for a given patient and provides access to these records, if granted, under consideration of the legal and technical requirements. The protocol combines cryptographic techniques with semantic annotation and mediation and presents a simple Web-service-based access to clinical documents.