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Nature Medicine 4, 991 (1998)
doi:10.1038/1969

US healthcare: take a number, please

Alan Dove1

  1. New York

Passed by the US Congress in 1996, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) contained a little-noticed provision requiring that every American citizen be assigned a Universal Health Identifier (UHID)—a system which is intended to benefit patient and doctors, and may be useful to public health workers, but which has recently come under attack from privacy advocates.On July 20th, a 17-member National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), began discussing implementation of the UHID.