Investigate approaches to patient identification

[jmcmurry]

Should the standard make any effort to standardize the ways that patient identifiers are represented?

Eg. for a paper, is it adequate to say "patient 1"?

This is a bag of worms--vicious, slippery ones. Gahhhh ... I don't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole. But we should nevertheless at least park it as an issue for (much) later. We should first think about scenarios where machine-actionable identification of patients is important.

Situations that come to mind are the usual suspects: Deduplicating results of parallel text-mining / data integration pipelines

We are a long way off from when that is going to be the bottleneck.