A Patient Identity Matching Service for Cloud-based Performance Management of Community Healthcare

Abstract

Managing patients with chronic and complex health conditions poses significant challenges to community healthcare in terms of quality and cost of care delivery. These challenges can be addressed through systematic performance management of care processes. However, heterogeneous healthcare data silos and inconsistent patient identity, coupled with patient privacy regulations, limit our ability to achieve systematic performance management of community healthcare. Cloud computing is an emerging technology that could be leveraged to address the issue of heterogeneous healthcare data silos, if a regional health authority provided data hosting with appropriate data sharing agreements and identity management. In this paper, we present a Patient Identity Matching Service for correlating cloud-hosted data from multiple stakeholders into a common data model to support performance management of community healthcare. We illustrate its use in a case study of performance management for community care of chronic and complex health conditions at a regional health authority in Canada.