MINDEX: Obtaining Demographics from PAS.                                  

There are two primary methods here.

The first method is for MINDEX to maintain its own PMI (Patient Master Index) on its own hard drive. This is one file that typically sizes to only 360MB for two million patient records (180 bytes per record) and is dependant upon a numeric-only hospital number which is used as the key index. Any addition/deletion/ammendment of the master record on PAS produces a transaction file that is made available to and merged into the local PMI.  Whenever a new patient record entry is started in MINDEX and as soon as the hospital number has been entered, that patient's demographics are retrieved from the PMI and inserted into MINDEX.  This method has worked faultlessly at many hospitals over the years.

The second method is a 'live' interface whereby MINDEX sends a query file to PAS and PAS returns a small demographic file in response. As no two PAS's use the same transaction/query methods, Medistat will develop these interfaces on a one-off basis, according to the requirements of the users.

Both methods require that the patient is registered on PAS - this is a problem where a department accepts referrals from out-of-district cases who are not registered.

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