Requirement for Health Numbers
Why are patient identifiers always required?
Background: Veribook is an online scheduling service used by medical clinics to enable their patients to schedule online.
Problem: Occasionally, we are asked why entering a patient name and health number (e.g. OHIP in Ontario, Care Care Number in B.C.) is required every time when booking an appointment.
Discussion: We strive to balance multiple considerations in the design of our system, including privacy, patient safety and care, security, and convenience.
The current status quo is that the first time our system is used on a particular device, individuals are asked to enter patient identifiers each time, and only at the last step, ask them to create an account or to sign in with an existing account.
If the “remember this patient on this device” option is selected, this is done to make it more convenient in the future. Accessing this information requires that the user to sign in again, to prevent misuse of the saved information.
