Master Patient Index (MPI)

A master patient index MPI is an electronic medical  database that is used across a healthcare organization to maintain consistent, accurate and current demographic and essential medical data on the patients seen and managed within its various departments. The patient is assigned a unique identifier that is used to refer to this patient across the enterprise. The objective is to ensure that each patient is represented only once across all the software systems used within the organization. The essential patient data includes name, gender, date of birth, race and ethnicity, social security number, current address and contact information, insurance information, current diagnoses, most recent date of hospital admission and discharge (if applicable), etc.

MPIs are intended to solve the common problem where multiple systems across the organization gradually become inconsistent with respect to the patient’s most current data when the patient’s information changes, and only one system is updated, i.e., the changes are not propagated to the others. A similar problem may be seen for non-healthcare organizations with respect to customer data.

The MPI stores information such as patient name, date of birth, gender, social security number and place of residence, email, phone and other content about the patient’s medical history. This provides a complete view of a patient and also a large-scale view of the demographics that a healthcare organization is working with. MPIs ensure that every patient is represented only once, and with constant demographic identification, within all systems of hospital data. By keeping this data well organized, hospitals can provide more efficient and accurate care for their patients.