The Provider information is typically present in many health care systems, and has many authoritative sources (e.g. licensing organizations) in each jurisdiction. The purpose of a Provider Registry is to collect provider information from many sources using a controlled, secure, central repository; and, to support the EHR by supplying accurate, timely provider identification to consumer applications and the EHR itselfRegistry (PR) is a foundational component of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) that provides a trusted and centralized source of regulated health service provider information to authorized custodians. The Registry supports the verification of health service provider licensing and identity information, as well as referral services by allowing authorized custodians to look up Practitioner Identifiers. Point-of-Service (POS) systems need to be able to query the PR to retrieve provider license and demographic information.
This Guide relates to standards used by Alberta Health to maintain provider information within the Provincial Provider Registry System (PRS) originally developed for the Western Health Information Collaborative (WHIC) provinces and later extended for use in Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador. The content of the guide reflects functionality that is available to all users of the PRS system although not yet deployed in all provincesand various EHR consumer applications.