How does the Health Informatics Centre work with ISD?
HIC was created to take full advantage of the foresight of Tayside Health Board, who established a Master Patient Index over thirty years ago. This Index used the Community Health Index Number (CHINo) as the patient identifier for all health records in Tayside. The establishment of the Master Patient Index in 1978 has enabled a rich variety of work using record linkage. In 2006 the Scottish Executive mandated that CHINo should be used to index all records across Scotland so we expect the benefits of record linkage to be increasingly available throughout Scotland. In the mean time HIC provides access to the clinical experience of using the CHINO that is already available in Tayside supported by well-established processes for confidentiality and security. HIC is working closely with ISD to ensure that the benefits of using the CHINo for improving patient care can be spread across Scotland. Current examples are the Scottish Care Information demonstration projects on diabetes and cardiovas
