donorid

Donorid is a proposed standardized identifier intended to uniquely identify donors across multiple organ, blood, tissue, and related donation registries and healthcare systems. It is designed to enable reliable linking of donor records while minimizing exposure of personally identifiable information.

The primary purpose of a donorid is to improve record de-duplication, cross-system matching, and longitudinal tracking of donation history. By providing a persistent, system-wide reference, donorid supports consent management, donation event tracking, and safer allocation processes. In practice, donorid would be assigned within a national or regional framework and used by participating registries, hospitals, and procurement organizations.

Format and assignment of donorid would typically aim for global uniqueness, such as a UUID or a cryptographically derived token. The identifier would be separable from direct personal identifiers, reducing privacy risks. Donorids would be stored in secure registries and linked to de-identified data sets for analysis, with access governed by role-based controls and auditing.

Data associated with a donorid may include consent status and version, donation events (blood, organ, tissue), retrieval or procurement dates, and limited anonymized demographic information necessary for matching. The donorid itself would act as the primary key to connect these records while protecting sensitive information through data minimization and privacy-preserving practices.

Governance of donorid would involve standards bodies and health authorities to define formats, interoperability rules, and privacy protections, ensuring compliance with relevant laws such as HIPAA and GDPR. Adoption requires coordination among registries, healthcare providers, and policymakers, along with investment in secure information exchanges and robust identity verification.

See also: Unique patient identifier, Organ donor registry, HL7 FHIR, Health information exchange.