Master patient index (MPI)

Why it matters

Duplicate and mismatched records are a patient safety risk. WHO named patient identification among its patient safety solutions in 2007, and the accompanying guidance notes that failure to identify patients correctly continues to result in medication, transfusion and testing errors [1]. An MPI stops one patient from accumulating several partial records and prevents results being filed against the wrong person.

Key points

• Registration should search before it creates, so staff find an existing record rather than open a new one.
• Matching uses deterministic rules, probabilistic scoring or both, applied to demographics and identifiers [2].
• Duplicates that slip through need a controlled merge with an audit trail.
• At national scale the equivalent component is the client registry in the OpenHIE architecture [3].

In Moana

Each patient registered in Moana receives a Moana ID, and clinicians, nurses, pharmacy and laboratory staff find the patient by name or Moana ID in the same Moana EHR, with search before create and duplicate detection.

Sources

1. Patient safety solutions: patient identification, WHO Collaborating Centre for Patient Safety Solutions, 2007
2. Patient identification and matching final report, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, 2014
3. OpenHIE client registry component specification, OpenHIE, 2024