SPOTLIGHT: Patient ID number concept falls into disfavor

Despite the inherent logic of assigning every American a personal patient identification code to help manage their electronic medical record information, it is unlikely to happen, Government Computer Week reports. Newer proposals lean towards a decentralized approach to managing the data. Current thinking favors either a probabilistic approach, similar to that used by some search engines, or a record locator model, which would rely on indexes to organize detailed information on the location of patient records. Story [1]