UNAIDS and the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) have issued a report—Considerations and guidance for countries adopting national health identifiers—offering guidance on how to improve service delivery through the adoption of national health identifiers (NHIDs).
NHIDs ensure that each patient has a unique identity within the health system. Treatment information across services can therefore be tracked at the individual level, ensuring that detailed personal medical records can be kept, which becomes increasingly important as greater numbers of people access health care.
Individual data can be collated to provide a bigger picture, facilitating the monitoring and evaluation of the effectiveness and efficiency of health services at the local, regional and national levels. In turn, this should enable more informed policy-making and a better integration of services.
The report provides a comprehensive guide to NHIDs, including sections on the roles and responsibilities of different actors during implementation, confidentiality, security and privacy concerns and considerations for estimating the resources needed to implement and maintain NHIDs.
“The development and implementation of national health identifiers is fundamental if country policy-makers want to be able to track the use, cost, outcome and impact of health services across facilities and time. However, these identifiers need to be devised and implemented in such a manner that the confidentiality and security of such personal health information remains protected at all times”.
Eddy Beck, Strategic Information Adviser, UNAIDS Caribbean Regional Support Team
