(v4) Patient master record

The UKRDC is a somewhat unique patient record database, in that it contains multiple individual records for the same physical patient.

This is because a given patient may, for example, attend multiple hospitals, each sending their own feed to the UKRDC. Similarly, a patient may move from one hospital to another, creating multiple records within the UKRDC. Importantly, for data protection, security, and organisation reasons, feeds from different renal units will always be stored as separate records within the UKRDC.

Furthermore, patients may have “secondary” records, such as old historic data migrated from older UKKA systems, tracing records used to verify demographic information, and membership records (see Managing membership records).

In order to keep these records organised and useful, we group individual records corresponding to a single physical patient into “master records”. Each “master record” is identified by a single UKRDC ID, which is shared by all the individual constituent patient records.

For example, let’s take a made-up patient, Benson Dunwoody, who has a record being sent to the UKRDC from a renal unit PARK01 via a UKRDC/RDA feed. The patient, a frequent traveller, also has a record being sent from EASTPINES via a UKRDC/RDA feed, a PKB membership record, and a TRACING record. Each of these records is stored individually within the UKRDC to allow staff at each unit to view only their data, and to prevent secondary records such as memberships and tracing data from interfering with the records sent by renal units (and vice versa). However, each of these records has a common UKRDC ID, and thus get grouped within the UKRDC into a master record corresponding to the individual patient.

Viewing a master record will display basic demographic data about the patient, and a list of all individual records the current user has permission to access. For example, a member of staff at one renal unit will not be able to see any individual records from other renal units, even for the same patient.

You will also be able to see the filename, time, and status of the most recent file received for the patient (see Active failing records).

Clicking “peek record” on a particular record will display additional basic information about that record, including patient numbers (national identifiers, and local hospital numbers for example), and creation and update times for the record.

Clicking “Open Record” will take you to a complete view of the patient record.

Issues

The Issues tab will show you any issues with the master record, such as errors caused by incoming files, or open work items (for data administrators). This can be particularly useful when resolving work items as it will show all open work items for that patient regardless of when they were raised.

Data files

The Data Files tab will show a complete list of all data files received by the UKRDC from any facility the current user has permission to access. This will include any error files listed in the Issues tab, as well as successfully received messages.

Audit logs

The Audit tab provides administrators with a way to query which UKRDC users have accessed specific parts of a patient’s record, with full timestamps, resource IDs, user information, and operation information.

FAQ

Why do you need a UKRDC ID? Can you not group records by NHS number?

No, quite simply because a patient could, for example, move between England and Scotland, and thus have two separate patient records with entirely different national identifiers, one an NHS number, and the other a CHI number.

Additionally, from time-to-time NHS numbers get incorrectly entered and so cannot be treated as immutable. A UKRDC ID allows records to be grouped and ungrouped by UKRDC administrators without affecting important underlying data.