Unique health identifiers are important for improving quality and continuum of care, strengthening surveillance of communicable diseases, eradicating diseases, and optimizing provider and payer transactions in health financing schemes. When they can be uniquely identified, wherever and whenever they interact with different health service providers, patients have a better chance to experience continuity of care. Unique patient identification helps the health system to deliver better care, because the patients’ unique health identifier can help attribute medical records across different providers to an individual subject of care. For health insurers, unique health identifiers can facilitate smoother payment systems, leading to faster claims reimbursements.
Using a modular series of easy-to-use questionnaires, this tool kit, produced by the Asian Development Bank, can help you:
- get an overview of the current use of identifiers important for the health sector,
- find opportunities to link existing patient identifiers,
- understand the existing legal framework and institutional setting for identification, and map the current stakeholders using identifiers relevant for health.