Understanding the type of an identifier

Hello,
I’m looking at this Patient resource from Jason Argonaut out of the Epic Sandbox and wondering about these identifiers.

  "identifier": [
{
  "use": "usual",
  "system": "urn:oid:1.2.840.114350.1.13.327.1.7.5.737384.0",
  "value": "E3826"
},
{
  "use": "usual",
  "system": "urn:oid:1.2.3.4",
  "value": "203579"
}

],

Obviously the second one is made up, but the first I’m not sure. In general, if you see urn:oid’s is there a resource where you can look them up and determine they have some well defined docs? What is that ID? If it’s an MRN then I’m in luck, but other MRN’s I’ve seen coming out the HAPI server or Cerner have more well defined identifier’s and will clue you that it is an MRN or something else.

you can look up an OID. In this case, you’ll see that it’s a sub-oid of a root oid issued to Epic, and no further information appears to be publicly available. You might find something in Epic documentation that is not publically available, but it seems unlikely in this case.

Generally, the concept of ‘type of identifier’ is way more slippery than it sounds when you say it quickly, and there’s a world of pain there.

1 Like

Thanks Grahame, I suspected as much. And… thanks for the hint, searching on root’s a few hits came up, including this one: http://oid-info.com/get/1.2.840.114350

Obviously it is not much help. This ID is only test data I guess, but the real puzzle is to know what to do with live data. Epic has hundreds of providers and knowing what to do with IDs that could be different in every case is the challenge.