A decentralized Offline Patient ID Generation and Matching Algorithm: Nigeria phone number-based proposal (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Quality of health service delivery data remains sub-optimal in many developing countries despite over a decade of progress in digitization and Health Management Information Systems (HMIS). Uniquely identifying Patients within the care continuum is the only way to guarantee better outcomes hinged on cross-institution shared health records. Many different strategies exist for uniquely identifying and tracking a patient in a health system, and they also have their trade-offs. OBJECTIVE This paper aims to use Nigeria, a typical low-and-middle-income country, to demonstrate how leading candidates for Patient identification fit in the digital Patient ID desirable attributes framework. This paper also designed and proposed an offline decentralized Patient ID generation and matching model to address network reliability challenges. METHODS We surveyed and present the leading candidates for Patient ID in Nigeria. We then designed a phone-based Patient matching model starting from current Nigeria's Federal Capital Territory administration model. RESULTS We show that no current Patient ID strategy simultaneously meets the six attributes of uniqueness, unchanging, uncontroversial, inexpensive, ubiquitous, and uncomplicated. We surveyed patient identification schemes and presented algorithms for universal-offline Patient ID generation and matching models. CONCLUSIONS Our model shows a prototype for generating and validating a universally unique Patient ID given a set of Patient characteristics without a central authority. This model can help fast-track implementing a Master Patient Index (MPI) in Low and Middle-Income Countries. CLINICALTRIAL