Welcome to Patient Matching
Status: specification v3.4.0, Final Consolidated Draft. Its effective date has not been set, and the end of its comment period is a placeholder in the specification. Two proposals are under review. See Status.
The specification defines when a responding entity SHALL return matching patient records. If the identity attributes in a query correspond to a combination listed in Table 2, and the query produces a unique candidate, the responding entity returns the records for that patient within the permitted scope for that query, subject to the administrative controls in section IV.D and Table 4. Table 2 lists combinations whose conservative probability of collision is 2e-12 (1 in 500 billion) or lower and that satisfy additional administrative controls. Two relationship-based rows carry caveats that the specification itself flags as unresolved.
This site hosts the specification, explains how its numbers are derived, and gives you the software and test data to check your implementation. The code, data, and documentation behind it are public.
Start with your role
Decision makers
What the specification requires of an organization, and why
Engineers
How to evaluate a query, and how to show your implementation conforms
Data scientists
How the collision probabilities were calculated, from what data
Reviewers and commenters
Read the specification, review proposals, and send comments
What's here
Specification
The full text of v3.4.0, one topic per page
Test set
Labeled cases for validating an algorithm
Reference implementations
A Python library and a matching service
Changelog
What changed in each version
Proposals
Proposals under review and accepted
Get involved
- Report an issue or comment on the draft.
- Contribute a proposal, test data, code, or documentation.
- See who has contributed.