Resumen
There are many potential benefits of having a computerized medical history, including the elimination of duplicate tests and procedures, better access to patient histories for emergency use, elimination of reentry of historical data, and greater accuracy. To make all patients' medical records in the U.S. accessible to care providers, electronic medical records need to be linked together using a massively distributed Master Patient Index (MPI). A MPI is a facility that correlates and cross-references patient identifiers and performs a matching function with high accuracy in an unattended mode. A massively distributed MPI will provide links to encounter data resident on provider databases and provide a patient summary. The summary will list the links to the encounter documents distributed all over the network. This summary can be loosely considered the patient's home page or a table of contents for the patient's massively distributed health care record. The National Institute of Standards has funded research in this area to help accelerate the development of a massively distributed MPI for the U.S. Research into the development of massively distributed MPI has focused on three technical hurdles: the development of a distributed database management system, being able to get data into the MPI from fragmented sources of disparate computer systems, and patient identification resolution capability.