AN ASSERTION-BASED RECORD LINKAGE IN DISTRIBUTED AND AUTONOMOUS HEALTHCARE ENVIRONMENTS

摘要

A method is provided for using assertions to reconcile records in a healthcare environment. Records are input, compared to a collection of previously input records and likelihood ratios indicating a probability of each input record match each of the collected records are calculated. The ratio is compared against two separate accept and reject criteria. Based on the comparison result it is decided whether a pair of records should be accepted as matching, rejected, or placed on a global exception list for manual review. The global exception list is split among the sites that are part of the federation, so that each site receives a local exception list referring to patients records at that site. Each site evaluates each pair of records in its local exception list and makes an assertion stating for each pair of records whether they are a match or a mis-match. This assertions derived during the manual review is placed in a global exception list and are accessible by other members in a federation of users. An assertion becomes the truth for the site making that assertion.