Open Enterprise Master Patient Index
Is an open source implementation of an Enterprise Master Patient (EMPI) which is a repository that maintains a registry of all patients across an enterprise. An EMPI provides many benefits including:
- Maintains a central registry of all patients and their demographics, assigning a unique identifier to each patient
- Eliminates duplicate patient registration entries that result due to changes in patient demographics (patient moved to another location), data entry errors during patient registration, or missing demographic information.
- Provides record locator service by enabling physicians across the enterprise to identify which health care providers a patient has visited.
The key functionality provided by an EMPI is its ability to identify matching patient registration records and link them together as they represent information about a single entity. An EMPI needs to be able to perform this record linkage even in the presence of errors and missing attributes. This key functionality is provided by a matching algorithm. There are a wide variety of matching algorithms that have been used in practice but they are classified into two categories:
- deterministic algorithms that search for an exact match between attributes
- probabilistic algorithms that search for an approximate match between two records
OpenEMPI is a standards-based EMPI that was designed with extensibility in mind. Its architecture uses the principles of SOA and its services, including the matching algorithm service, can be replaced with alternate implementation simply through changes to a configuration file. The current version includes an implementation of both a deterministic and a probabilistic algorithm but alternate implementations can be developed and plugged into the system without any modifications to the rest of the system.
Check out the latest OpenEMPI 2.01
OpenEMPI, the latest major and stable version
of the open source Enterprise Master Patient Index.
You may download
the binary distribution and install it on your server, or build it
from the source using the instructions below.
