Identification is crucial for theefficient and effective delivery of health services andpublic health management and is therefore instrumental forachieving sustainable development goal (SDG). Providers needto know a patient’s identity to access relevant medical andtreatment histories and ensure that they are givingconsistent and appropriate care. Patients also needdocumentation to prove enrollment in insurance programs orother safety nets that cover medical expenses. As analternative to creating a health-specific functionalidentification system, some countries have instead opted touse existing foundational identification systems, such aspopulation registers, unique identification numbers (UINs)or national ID (NID) cards, as the basis for patientidentification, verification, and authentication. The goalof this paper is therefore to synthesize selected examplesof how foundational systems are used for healthcare in avariety of countries. The authors hope that this initialeffort at framing the utility of foundational identificationfor healthcare and providing early lessons and keyconsiderations will help guide future work in this area bypractitioners, donors, and researchers. This paper isorganized as follows: section one gives introduction.Section two provides an overview of the main areas in whichusing a foundational system is likely to impact healthcare.Section three illustrates the impact areas using countrycases from Botswana, Estonia, India, Korea, and Thailand. Inlight of these examples, section four discusses the keyissues for practitioners to consider when integratingfoundational identification into health care systems,including high-level design issues and strategies formaintaining data privacy and security. Section five providesconcluding thoughts.
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