About VUHID

The VUHID system is the result of a standards effort established by committee ASTM E31. ASTM is an international standards organization with over 100 years of history developing standards. E31 is the healthcare standards development committee of ASTM. The basic standard defining the properties of the VUHID healthcare identifier has been in place since 1995 in the form of standard E 1714. That standard has been upgraded twice, most recently in 2007. Also in 2007 for the first time a companion standard E 2553 was developed that describes the implementation strategy described in this web site. Based on the development of these documents a private implementation effort was launched early in 2007. While it is too early to determine exactly when VUHID identifiers will become available the current plan is for this to happen some time in 2008. It is the intention of the implementation group to ensure that individual identifiers can always be issued at no cost to the patient.