🆔Virtual health address or Health Account

Also known by Health ID

The primary purpose of health IDs or health accounts is to create a reliable and tamper-proof identification mechanism that underpins all interactions in the healthcare domain. By assigning digital identities, stakeholders can access health records, initiate health services and transactions, and engage in communication while maintaining data integrity and authenticity.

A Virtual Health Address is a secure identification method for an individual in a health ecosystem, crucial for efficient patient management, data sharing and access to services across healthcare systems. It ensures that healthcare providers have access to accurate patient information, enabling consistent and appropriate care. Additionally, Health Addresses are vital for insurance verification, research, and public health management, contributing to improved healthcare outcomes and the goal of achieving universal healthcare by streamlining processes and enhancing data accuracy and accessibility. An individual can have multiple health addresses.

Purpose for a Health Address/Account Registry:

• Share and link medical records in a decentralised federated architecture; enabling the creation of a longitudinal medical record

• Enabling linking to family PHRs for assisted care delivery and consent management

• Track insurance claims or access to any government health programs or benefits

Usage by Each Stakeholder:

• Citizen/Patient: Individuals can select their preferred identifiers and benefit from streamlined and secure identification and authentication when seeking medical care, participating in telemedicine consultations, accessing health records, scheduling appointments, and verifying their identity to receive G2P benefits.

• Healthcare Providers: Securely access patient information, document medical procedures, and maintain accurate treatment histories. Digital identification enables providers to administer personalised care by providing insights into a patient's medical history, diagnoses, medications, and treatment plans.

• Hospitals and Health Facilities: Leverage digital IDs to streamline patient registration, optimise appointment management, and enhance resource allocation.

• Government and Regulatory Authorities: Monitor healthcare activities, ensure compliance with standards, disburse benefits, and facilitate data exchange.

• Insurance Providers: Verify patient identities, process claims, and manage policyholder information.

Common Pitfalls in Design of Health ID and Virtual Health Account Systems

1. Overloading the ID registrywith excessive data fields that are difficult to keep updated, and creates challenges in scaling to the full population.

2. Mandatory linkagewith one or more national ID systems tends to reduce adoption of a registry.

3. Absence of health ID aliases/tokens: Tokenisation adds another layer of privacy by masking the health account address so that the original information is not exposed to other systems.

Our View on Common Debates Regarding Health ID and Virtual Health Account Number:

Should virtual health IDs and health accounts be unique, or should a person be allowed to have multiple health accounts?

Ideally, there shouldn’t be a limit on the number of health accounts an individual can create. This is necessary to ensure that individuals can present and take control of their records in a privacy-preserving manner.

But how does that create a longitudinal health record? What if patients hide key details from someone, for example, an insurer, by not divulging an entire account?

Individuals should always have the choice to share or withhold their data. Now, rules and regulations can be imposed on a workflow to incentivise individuals to consolidate records spread across multiple health accounts, and failure to do so can be dealt with separately.

However, the technology infrastructure should always support the creation of multiple health records.

Should health accounts be linked to national IDs or any other IDs?

For privacy and security reasons, it's advisable not to link any ID systems together. However, if authentication of an individual or entity is necessary for a transaction, existing digital ID systems or even mobile numbers can be used. Collecting a (unique) digital ID number during the creation of a health account can aid in deduplication, which is crucial when taxpayer money is being spent. For all other practical purposes, you don’t need to link a health account to a national ID.