The CPRI is a nonprofit membership organization committed to advancing improvements in health care quality, cost, and access through use of information technology. It serves as a neutral forum for bringing together diverse interests of health care stakeholders to develop common solutions. The IOM study describes the potential value for increasing quality and decreasing costs of health care with the use of a computer-based patient record. While the need for a unique health identifier is generally agreed upon, and various options have been debated, no breakthrough strategy for a specific solution has been advanced. More recently, several states have mandated the use of SSN for state data reporting and have required process changes to facilitate issuance of numbers.
Several organizations support creation of a new numbering system to be used as the identifier.
There are many algorithms proposed to create such a number involving various pieces of demographic information about an individual. ASTM's Guide for the Properties of a Universal Healthcare Identifier outlines many of the limitations of using the current SSN and issuance policies. For example, SSNs are not issued at birth, not everyone receiving health care in the US is eligible for a SSN, some individuals have more than one SSN, and in some cases one SSN has been issued to more than one individual. A technical deficiency in the existing SSN is the lack of a check digit. Use of a check digit is an important tool to help catch transcription errors.