Adding A New Patient Identifier Type

Identifiers are used to uniquely identify patients within the system. Different types of identifiers are distributed by various healthcare systems. Some of these systems will be within your control, so you will be able to control how identifiers are created and distributed; however, there will likely be identifiers that are not within your control but are useful to record within your system to aid in patient identification.

1. Go to Administration ? Manage Patients ? Manage Identifier Types

2. Click on "Add Patient Identifier Type"

3. Provide a name the new identifier type

   • The name should be specific to the authority providing the identifiers — e.g., "Wilson Hospital Medical Record Number"

4. Provide a clear description of the identifier types, including identifying the authority responsible for distributing the identifiers

5. Optionally provide a format for the identifiers

   • The "Regex Format" allows you to enforce a pattern for identifiers using a Regular Expression (describes the identifier pattern in a way the computer can understand) — e.g., "\d{1,8}-\d" would allow 1 to 8 digits followed by a dash and a single digit

6. The "Description of Format" allows you to describe the required pattern in a way that users of the system can understand — e.g. "Must follow the pattern NNNNNNNN-N (up to 8 digits followed by a dash and a final digit)"

7. Specify whether the identifier is required

8. Specify whether check digits should be enforced for this identifier type

9. Specify the uniqueness behavior for the identifier type, the options are (This will be in version 1.10. The ticket for it is Ticket-1940(Will be Fixed in 1.10))

   • Unique: Indicates that identifiers should be globally unique

   • Non Unique: Indicates that duplicate identifiers are allowed

   • Location: Indicates that identifiers should be unique only across a single location, this can only be enforced if the identifier's location property is not null

10. Specify the location behavior for the identifier type, the options are (This is added in version 1.9. The ticket for this is Ticket-427(Fixed in 1.9) 

    • Required: Indicates that location is required for the current identifier type

    • Not Used: Indicates that location is not used for the current identifier type

11. Click on the button to save your new identifier type