A focus area maturity model for a statewide master person index.
OBJECTIVE
The sharing of personally identifiable information across organizational boundaries to facilitate patient identification in Utah presents significant policy challenges. Our objective was to create a focus area maturity model to describe and evaluate our progress in developing a policy framework to support a statewide master person index (sMPI) for healthcare and public health operations and research in Utah.


METHODS
We used various artifacts, including minutes from policy guidance committee meetings over a span of 18 months, a report from Utah's Digital Health Services Commission, and a draft technical requirements document to retrospectively analyze our work and create a focus area maturity model describing the domain of policy needed to support the sMPI. We then used our model to assess our progress and future goals.


CONCLUSIONS
The focus area maturity model provides an orderly path that can guide the complex process of developing a functional statewide master person index among diverse, autonomous partners. While this paper focuses on our experience in Utah, we believe that the arguments for using a focus area maturity model to guide the development of state or regional MPIs is of general interest.
Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT USA ; Utah Department of Health, Salt Lake City, UT USA.
Jeffrey
J
Duncan
Wu
W
Xu
Scott P
SP
Narus
Stephen
S
Clyde
Barry
B
Nangle
Sid
S
Thornton
Julio
J
Facelli
(MeSH): Medical Record Linkage; Confidentiality; Organizational Policy; Systems Interoperability