Review and Link Master-Patient-Index Candidates

When the same person is registered at two facilities in a network — perhaps they were seen at the main hospital and later at a satellite clinic — Veona notices the likely match and surfaces it for a human to decide. It never silently merges two records, because linking the wrong two people would expose one patient’s notes under another’s chart. A trained steward makes the call.

Who / when: the MPI Data Steward (or the Group Administrator), working through the review queue whenever new probable matches appear. The MPI (Master Patient Index) is the network-wide index that links the records of the same real person across facilities under one master patient identity. A candidate is a probable-match pair the system has flagged for review.

We will follow Folake, the network’s data steward.

1. Steward — open Group → Patient Index (MPI). The screen shows two things: the queue of pending candidate pairs awaiting review, and the master patients already linked.
2. Steward — open a candidate pair. Veona shows why it was flagged — the matched identifiers it found (for example the same name, date of birth and phone number registered at two facilities) — so you can judge whether it is genuinely one person.
3. Steward — if it is a real match, press “Link”. The two facility records are now tied to one master patient identity; a clinician at either site will see that this patient has a record at the other.
4. Steward — if it is not the same person (a coincidental match), press “Reject” to dismiss the candidate, and it leaves the queue.
5. Steward — if a match was confirmed in error, find the master patient in the linked list and “Unlink” the wrong member to detach it.

Caution

Linking is a clinical-safety decision, not just data tidy-up. Linking two different people would surface one patient’s record under another’s chart — and unlinking afterwards cannot un-see what was already read. Link only when the candidate clearly shows the matched identifiers; when in doubt, reject.

Note

How aggressively the system proposes candidates is set by the Group Administrator in Group → Network (the network policy). A cautious network keeps the match threshold strict, so only high-confidence pairs reach the steward’s queue.

What happens next

Once two records are linked, the same person is recognised across the network: a clinician viewing their chart at one facility sees a linked records affordance pointing to the record held at the other site. Reading it is a deliberate, consented, audited step — covered next. Every link, reject and unlink the steward performs is recorded in the tamper-evident audit log.

Follow the trail

• Next: Read a Patient’s Records Across Facilities (Break-Glass)
• Related: Read the Consolidated Network Report · Veona Group module reference