Privacy

How PVIDs Work

Healthcare deals with many items of information that should remain private. The VUHID system is designed to help support these privacy needs through its ability to issue as many PVIDs as a person may need. PVIDs work in the following way. A PVID is a VUHID identifier where only a limited number of people know the identity of the associated person. When you are issued a PVID you will, of course, know that it applies to you. Just as an example, let's suppose that you want a PVID to use for psychiatric information that you want to be kept separate from the rest of your medical records. When you visit your psychiatrist you request a PVID for this purpose. The request process is exactly the same as that for requesting an OVID with the exception that your request indicates that this PVID is to be used for psychiatric information. The PVID that is returned to your psychiatrist's office by the enterprise master person index (see the section on EMPIs) is from a VUHID identifier class reserved specifically for this type of use. Only you, your psychiatrist, and the issuing EMPI know the identity of the person associated with your PVID. Unless you choose to reveal your identity associated with this PVID to someone else, everyone else who sees information associated with this identifier will not know who this person is.

Managing PVIDs

This is the fundamental improvement in medical privacy offered by PVIDs. Private VUHID identifiers are numeric identifiers that can be used to link various pieces of medical information together but -- unless you or your physician specifically choose to reveal your identity -- anyone receiving this information will not know who the information is about. Note that the "rules" governing proper behavior of various classes of PVIDs will be different. The proper way to handle psychiatric data will be different from the way to handle medical information being used in a research project and that, in turn, will be different from information that might be used to look for evidence of an epidemic. Most of the "rules" for proper handling of these various situations have not yet been fully determined but the VUHID design ensures that the system can establish proper classes of identifiers for a great number of different circumstances as they become defined and the proper policy to follow is determined for each.