Overview

The system must allow a provider to specify one or more patients in real time or those scheduled for appointment(s) in the future (e.g., the next day, week, month, etc.) so that a request can be sent to the public health immunization registry for each patient’s complete immunization history.

Example

Doctor Smith is a pediatrician. Via the EHR Dr. Smith’s office uses, her office manager sends requests to the local public health immunization registry every Friday to retrieve immunization histories for all patients scheduled for appointments during the next week.

On Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Smith’s office manager wants to identify all patients added to the schedule since the request was sent on the prior Friday. She wants to view the list of all patients scheduled for appointments, identify those that were added to the schedule, and send a new request to the registry for immunization histories that does not include any duplicate requests for patients included in the request sent the previous Friday.

Guidance

The HL7 2.5.1 Implementation Guide lists data elements usable for patient identification. Click here for the full set of demographic data elements. When provided with such information, systems should store and submit it. The fields most likely to be absent in existing software the project evaluated include multiple birth indicator and birth order. These fields are helpful in immunization registries to differentiate children from multiple births, especially when other differentiating data are not available from the birth facility. Capturing complete data (e.g., a full middle name rather than a middle initial) is preferable to differentiate patients with similar names.

• Vendor Perspective. Products with the ability to store all elements listed as required (R), required if exist (RE), and conditional (C) may more commonly match patients with those in public health registries by allowing capture of a superset of demographic elements to manage the variation in statutory requirements.
• Provider and Implementer Perspectives. Capturing more demographic data elements for each patient helps match patients within the practice and especially when communicating with immunization registries. Better matching increases the likelihood that queries sent to the registry for information will identify unique patients and return data to the practice.

Test

There are no tests for this capability.

Data Elements

Click here for data elements associated with the capability Select One or More Patients.