What is Master Patient Index (MPI)?

The purpose of the Master Patient Index (MPI) is to simplify searching for studies across multiple facilities. It does this by identifying and linking all different IDs for a patient in an enterprise under a single ID unique at the enterprise level.

Multiple patient identification domains often exist in multi-facility environments. This means that a patient admitted at one facility in the enterprise may not have the same patient ID there as at another facility within the same enterprise. Another scenario is that two different patients may have the same ID in different identification domains but within the same enterprise. Thus, it becomes necessary to have a single unique ID for each patient within the enterprise in order to represent all other IDs that patient may have and prevent duplicate IDs. This single unique ID is often know as the Global Patient Identifier (GPI) or Enterprise ID (EID).

The Master Patient Index generates the GPI separately from the IMPAX software. Since the GPI is representative of multiple patient IDs, running a query using GPI should return all studies that exist for that patient across the enterprise.