Patient Identification

Patient identification is, in modern times, a complicated issue. This software, like any computer system, requires a way to uniquely identify patients. Once upon a time, the Social Security Number was adequate for this. But now there are problems with that, including fear of identity theft and undocumented workers. Health care systems have responded with a complex variety of strategies.

We have done our best to accommodate the many approaches now taken to identifying patients. As a result, we can not tell you here exactly how you will identify patients in Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine . This is a matter of policy in your clinic. Here is what we can say:

  • The program includes 5 possible ways to identify patients: SSN, medical record number, employee ID, universal patient index, internal number.

  • Each of the identifiers has three possible settings: required, optional, or not used. Your IT department will have made the correct settings in the software Admin System Parameter based on your facility's identification policies.

  • At least one of these identifiers is required in the software. It might be that in your system more than one is required. For instance, any clinic that bills insurance companies will probably require the SSN. A clinic that is part of a multi-facility enterprise might also have a required universal patient index number.

  • Any identifier marked as "not used" will not be displayed on the [Enter Patient] window. As a result, you screen might look a different from some of the screen shots you will see in these help topics. If you used all the fields, this is what you would see:

    (The fifth possible ID, the Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine internal identifier, will always be in the background.)

  • If you are part of a multi-facility enterprise and use medical record numbers, they might have to be unique for all patients across the enterprise, or they might just have to be unique within each clinic.

  • If you enter an SSN that is already in the system, you will get this message:

    Clicking This is the Same Person displays the existing record for editing. Clicking This is a Different Person requires you to enter an SSN which is not already in the system.

  • The window used for locating a patient will have columns for only the IDs you are using. Patients can be searched for by each of the active IDs.