The use of 'health passports', as in Malawi, which maintains the same antenatal clinic identifier over time, also holds promise.
13 15 We also determined the number of primary, medical specialty and mental healthcare visits, emergency department visits, and admissions for medical, surgical or mental healthcare, categorising encounters by clinic identifier codes (for outpatient utilisation) and treating specialty codes that indicate location of care (for inpatient utilisation).
Digitally recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim into a text database with all provider, clinic, and patient identifiers removed.
First, certain key variables, e.g., diagnosis priority at hospital facilities, and clinic type and patient identifier at DoD facilities, either were not available or were inadvertently excluded.
Campbell, D. Identifying the Identifiers.
Demographic data were acquired via annual linkage (using pseudo-anonymized identifiers such as clinic number, soundex and date of birth) to the UK Collaborative HIV Cohort Study UK CHICC), which includes patients from 13 of the largest clinics within the UK [15], and to the HIV and AIDS Reporting System (HARS) [16], coordinated by Public Health England.
This could be achieved either directly using patient information (e.g. last name or clinic number) or generating a specific unique identifier that can be linked to the patient information.
This process was necessary since clinic and laboratory records did not use unique patient identifiers (such as the unique South African citizen identity number or ID).
We collected the HINs and other identifiers for all patients treated at the clinic between 1992 and the end of 1999.
