PHC-Hub logo PHC Hub Administrator User Guide (v. March 2018)

Patient Identification and Matching

IWeb uses two IDs to identify patients: its own internal SIIS ID and the externally defined medical record number (i.e., chart number or patient ID), which must be unique to an organization. A patient in IWeb has one SIIS ID and one or more medical record numbers, one for each organization the patient has an association with. If no medical record number is defined, it defaults to the SIISCLIENT+SIIS ID.

Deduplication

IWeb uses deduplication to identify and merge duplicate patient records. This results in one of three actions:

If there is a good match for exactly one patient record in the registry, the two records are automatically merged together
If there is not a good match for any patient records in the registry, it is automatically added as a new patient record
If there is a possible match with one or more patient records, the records must be reviewed before they can be merged

Most administrators run deduplication nightly, which means that updates are not visible in IWeb until the next day. In addition, records marked for manual review by IWeb administrators are not available until they are reviewed, which may take several days. PHC Hub has responsibility for the message, but doesn't indicate that the message has been processed and merged into IWeb.

PHC Hub can request automatic deduplication on certain incoming HL7 messages, so that IWeb users don't have to wait to see imported patient information. This has some limitations, such as:

Most patients are accepted immediately, but some still have to be manually reviewed to determine a proper registry match. Depending on the registry deduplication work queue, this may take several days. The sending systems can reduce the number of records that are affected by ensuring that complete patient records are sent. The more complete a patient record's demographics are, the more likely it is to be confidently matched to other records.
IWeb runs the primary deduplication process every night, which may take several hours. Automatic deduplication requests that are sent during off hours are queued to run after the nightly process. This delay is particularly noticeable after IWeb upgrades, when the nightly process runs for long periods of time (sometimes all night) to apply new changes to patient records.