ID namespace for composer and healthcare facility

Technical (archive)
1

Hi,
Compositions require id_namespace for composer and healthcare facility, along with id & id_scheme, to uniquely identify them. How do we ensure universal uniqueness for such name spaces? Is there any central registry where EHR systems are supposed to register their namespaces?

regards

2

Hi Dileep,

as far as I know, all target OBJECT_IDs of the various concrete types are already globally unique. I suspect the namespace attribute will not be used in the future, or will have just informational value. It would be useful to know what other implementers currently do with this attribute.

- thomas

3

Hi Thomas,
Thanks for the info.

Just to clarify my understanding, you feel that the namespace attribute in for information only and so can be set as we choose.

However, I am not sure that I understand your statement “all target OBJECT_IDs of the various concrete types are already globally unique”. Do you mean using UUIDs for EHRID, PersonID etc? Can you elaborate some more one how this is being managed?

regards

4

At the moment I think you can safely default the namespace attribute to a value like “EHR”, “Demographic”, “Terminology” etc, which acts as a service name or type.

Now, if you look at the OBJECT_ID sub-types, you’ll see that they are either UID-based - i.e. based on GUID or maybe OID (avoid if humanly possible), or reverse domain names. These are all already globally unique.

The subtypes ARCHETYPE_ID, TEMPLATE_ID (not in use) are also globally unique. To make archetype ids properly globally unique, they can/should have true namespaces prepended, as described here. Section 7 of that doc gives you some examples. The class that defines those identifiers is ARCHETYPE_HRID. All of these id types are for design artefacts, so I think not your primary concern right now. The type TERMINOLOGY_ID is the same, but less well controlled, but usually reliably global, because major terminologies tend to be in global use.

The remaining type, GENERIC_ID, is assumed to be a string with a scheme type that makes it unique, but might not. The example is things like patient hospital ids. Ideally, national patient ids, social security numbers etc are unique.

  • thomas
5

Thanks Thomas for the additional information

regards