Development of a piece of software for pairing and integration of personal and health information, using record linkage method and HL-7 standardization

• Grant number: 04/02758-9
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Innovative Research in Small Business - PIPE
• Start date: December 01, 2004
• End date: March 31, 2006
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Biomedical Engineering
• Principal Investigator: José Augusto Vasconcellos Neto
• Grantee: José Augusto Vasconcellos Neto
• Company: IPS Informação e Planejamento em Saúde, Assessoria, Comércio, Importação e Exportação Ltda
• City: Campinas

Abstract

The aim of this project is the construction of a system which administers customer subscription records, establishing a correlation (or pairing) between two or more subscriptions of the same person using record linkage techniques. The correlated subscriptions may originate in the same or different databases. In addition to this, the system integrates the health information originating in the different data bases using the HL7 protocol. Thus, the project is based on two technologies (record linkage and HL7) which, although not exactly new, are to a certain extent still experimental and not very well known in Brazil. The innovative aspects of this project are: 1) the use of record linkage to establish a permanent master patient index; 2) the joint use of the two technologies; 3) the adaptation of these technologies to the Brazilian reality; 4) the use of methodological innovations such as nebulous logic and graph theory in record linkage; and 5) research into a robust and scalable architecture capable of processing all the databases in the Ministry of Health (a few terabytes). The planning for phase 1 of the project includes, among other activities, concluding the specification of the system modules; specification of the principal algorithms; specification of the data storage; the implementation of a complete prototype with all the modules. (AU)