Information for VUHID stakeholders

VUHID will impact virtually every constituency in the healthcare continuum. It is essential that each group receive education and information on how VUHID works to protect sensitive personal information and improve the accuracy of patient identification thus ensuring that healthcare providers have the right data on which to base important clinical decisions.

• Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) and Regional Health Information Networks (RHIOs) — Patient identify management is a challenge that every organization seeking to safely and accurately share patient information must address. While many of the decisions you face relate to governance, policy and procedure, you also need the right tools to support compliance. Working with your EMPI vendor and your systems integrator, VUHID can vastly improve the accuracy of patient identification and enhance privacy protections. Learn more about VUHID.
• Consumers and Patients — As consumers, we all want to control who has access to our healthcare information — for ourselves and our families. VUHID improves these protections by allowing patients to identify components of their medical history that are "open" (i.e., available to all authorized healthcare staff) or "private" (i.e., available only to specified categories of caregivers). It is vitally important that consumers understand how VUHID can be used to make encounters with their healthcare providers more convenient, safer and their information more secure. Learn how VUHID works for patients.
• EMPI vendors — The GPII strategy for VUHID deployment depends on strong partnerships with EMPI vendors, since the EMPI is a foundational component of every RHIO and HIE technology suite. Through simple linkages between the EMPI application and the VUHID web site, VUHID identifiers are distributed and managed, providing secure links among providers who need access to patient information across care delivery sites. The EMPI will continue to support mission-critical patient identity management — but with enhanced accuracy and security through the use of VUHID identifiers. Contact GPII about becoming a GPII partner.
• Payers — Accurate patient identification is essential in determining eligibility, managing benefits and providing timely reimbursement. Payers also have a vested interest in preventing medical identity theft to ensure that services are delivered correctly to your members. The use of VUHID identifiers enables a variety of innovative approaches that can dramatically decrease the risk of medical identity theft. Contact GPII about becoming a GPII partner.
• Pharmaceutical manufacturers — Clinical trials are often the most costly and challenging aspects of developing new medications. Identifying potential participants, assembling their clinical information and ensuring their privacy can consume time and resources, and delay bringing effective treatments to market. VUHID can mitigate these challenges by enabling patients to participate in clinical trials without jeopardizing the privacy of their clinical information. It also can play a major role in ensuring that e-prescribing activities occur in an efficient and error-free manner. Contact GPII about becoming a GPII partner.
• Public health — Many public health functions such as disease surveillance, research and education may require assembling large amounts of information on patient populations of significant size. VUHID can facilitate the creation and use of such data while preserving patient privacy and maintaining uniqueness of each data set being analyzed. Contact GPII about how the VUHID system can assist public health projects.
• International projects — As we watch healthcare services cross borders for purposes such as international travel, disease and epidemic management, and "medical tourism", VUHID can play a critical role to ensure that patients’ electronic health records can be exchanged without identification errors both within countries as well as abroad. Because VUHID implements a recognized international standard it can help avoid the need to perform "point to point" negotiations between each pair of countries or political entities about how to unambiguously identify each patient. Contact GPII about VUHID support for international healthcare activities.
• Foreign healthcare systems — VUHID is inherently designed to be global in scope. VUHID identifiers implement an international standard, are language independent, are each globally unique, and are able to support either voluntary or mandatory assignment to patient populations. Because no patient data is ever sent to the VUHID system it can comply with the strictest privacy and confidentiality regulations. The flexibility of VUHID privacy classes ensures that VUHID identifiers can be properly deployed and used in virtually any regulatory environment. Contact GPII about VUHID support for international healthcare activities.