The scope of these data elements includes identification of individual and organisation health care providers. The data elements also allow for identification of an individual in a health care organisation. The definition of health care provider is:
'any person or organisation who is involved in or associated with the delivery of healthcare to a client, or caring for client wellbeing'.
The data elements have been defined to enable a common, best practice approach to the way data are captured and stored, to ensure that records relating to a provider will be associated with that individual and/or organisation and no other. The definitions are proposed for clinical and administrative data management purposes.
The ability to positively identify health care providers and locate their relevant details is an important support to the provision of speedy, safe, high quality, comprehensive and efficient health care. Unambiguous identification of individual health care providers is necessary for:
Requesting and reporting of orders, tests and results (e.g. pathology, diagnostic imaging)
Other communications and referrals between health care providers regarding ongoing care of patients (e.g. a referral from a GP to a specialist, a hospital discharge plan)
Reporting on health care provision to statutory authorities (e.g. reporting of hospital patient administration systems data to State/Territory government health agencies)
Payments to providers
Registration of providers
Directories or lists of providers and their service locations for consumer information.
Collection and usage attributes
Collection methods:
Collected at point of entry to health care for the purposes of the identification of the provider of that health care.
Comments:
There are many barriers to successfully identifying individuals in health care settings, including variable data quality; differing data capture requirements and mechanisms; and varying data matching methods. This data set specification provides a framework for improving the confidence that the data being associated with any given individual or organisation, is appropriately associated.
Source and reference attributes
Submitting organisation:
Standards Australia Inc Health Informatics Committee (IT-014)
Reference documents:
Health care client identification DSS
The Australian Standard AS4846 Health Care Provider Identification identifies other data that should be collected. These data are collections of free text information and as such are not capable of standardisation as a national health data standard. Within AS4846 however they form part of the data collection necessary for the complete identification of a heath care provider.
These data elements are identified in the section Standardised elsewhere section below.
If these data elements are collected in conjunction with those of the Data set specification they form a collection equivalent to that of the Australian Standard AS4846.
