Univeral Health Identifier (UHI)

DRAFT - Universal Health Identifier

This purpose of the Univeral Health Identifier (UHI) is to define a univeral health identifier convention for the United States. UHI is intended to be implemented by governments, health payers (insurance companies) and health care providers when assigning a patient-selected (or member selected) master patient index (MPI).

Here are some considerations for a UHI:

• A UHI should be easy to remember.
• A UHI should play nicely with automated phone-based systems (telephony) as well as Internet systems.

The proposed convention is a 15 digit number.

Definitions

• Individual - A single human being for whom a UHI is created and maintained.
• Issuer - The system and legal entitiy responsible for issing a UHI to an Individual.

The UHI Specification

• A Universal Health Identifier (UHI) MAY be abreviated as "UHI".
• A UHI SHALL be a 15 chacter ASCII string of only digits.
• The first 14 digits (position 1-14) SHALL be system defined by the Issuer
• The first 14 digits (position 1-14) MAY be defined by the individual identified by the UHI.
• The first 14 digits (position 1-10) MAY be the Individual's phone number.
• The last 1 digit (position 15) SHALL be a checksum of the previous 14 digits generated using the Luhn Algorithm.
• A UHI SHOULD be permanent for an Individual.
• A UHI MAY be one and the same as a sub (Subject) within Open ID Connect. https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html#SubjectIDTypes

Example

304837555543213

It may contain dashes for human readability, but these SHALL be are are ignored for processing.

nnn-nnn-nnnn-nnnn-n

Example (With Dashes)

304-837-5555-4321-3

In Open ID Connect, and JWT the sub (Subject) MAY contain the UHI without dashes. See https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7519

Feedback

This is a DRAFT. Comments, ideas, and criticism are welcome. Please contribute via Github issues or a pull request.