DICOM PS3.17 2024e - Explanatory Information

YYYY.7.8 Multiple Patient IDs

The basic DICOM Patient Information Entity, as used in the Inventory IOD, supports a primary Patient ID (0010,0020) with an optional issuer or assigning authority, plus additional IDs and issuers in the Other Patient IDs Sequence (0010,1002). The DICOM Attributes describing the assigning authority have mappings to corresponding HL7v2 CX Data Type components (see Section 10.15 “Issuer of Patient ID Macro” in PS3.3).

As PACS migration or consolidation often involves Patient IDs from multiple assigning authorities, organizations should establish well-defined assigning authority identifiers. The implementer of the Inventory production application and the user organization should consider whether to include values for Issuer of Patient ID (0010,0021) in production of an Inventory, even if those are not managed in the repository database. Such values may especially facilitate consolidation of multiple repositories.

Notes

  1. See the [IHE RAD TF-1] Scheduled Workflow.b (SWF.b) Integration Profile and its Enterprise Identity Option.

  2. Similar considerations may be applied to the Issuer of Accession Number Sequence (0008,0051).

Some repository management systems, particularly those that support independent but related organizations, handle multiple Patient ID schemes. In such an environment, Query/Retrieve from applications in one organization may be returned with the Patient IDs for that organization, while the same queries from a different organization will have the Patient IDs for that second organization; the same approach may be used for production of inventories that have different views of the data for different users. To distinguish queries from the different organizations, the repository management system may use Application Entity Titles in two different ways. First, it may associate the SCU's Calling AE Title with an organization context; this requires the SCP to know all SCU AE Titles. A second approach has the SCP implement multiple Called AE Titles, each assigned to a different organization; each SCU is then configured to call the SCP AE Title appropriate to its organization.

If the SCP for the Inventory Creation Service provides separate data views for different organizations, the name for the view may be encoded in the Station Name (0008,1010) or the Inventory Instance Description (0008,0402) Attribute.

DICOM PS3.17 2024e - Explanatory Information