The Office of Systems Integration (OSI), on behalf of the California Health and Human Services Agency (CalHHS) and Center for Data Insights and Innovation (CDII), has published a request for information about a Person Identity Matching Solution. The idea springs from CalHHS’ Strategy for Digital Identities document published last year, which the agency is encouraging vendors to review.
The solution, which OSI anticipates will be cloud-based, will need to handle more than 60 million personal identity records scattered across databases built on different technologies, managed by different departments and in different formats. The new technology is meant to make it easier to link that information together accurately, giving state workers a “whole-person view of health and social services information.”
Current record-matching work takes considerable effort.
“Many approaches to person matching and record linking are deterministic, requiring exact or near-exact matches of person attributes,” the RFI reads. “Many processes are manual and labor intensive. As a result, many opportunities to link records are missed, and departments expend significant manual effort in linking records; effort that could be better used in providing services and evaluating the equity and effectiveness of care delivery.”
The new solution will need to be able to take queries via application programming interface (API), as well as:
- Use probabilistic and/or deterministic and/or referential matching algorithms to identify matching identities
- Return the likelihood for each matching identity via the digital interface
- Return results that identify multiple possibilities of matched digital identities if matching a likelihood threshold
- Return matching identities if they exist or create a new digital identity with the person attributes of the query if they do not exist
More requirements are listed in the RFI.
The solution, as well as the Strategy for Digital Identities, is part of the Data Exchange Framework established through Assembly Bill 133, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021.
Vendor responses are due July 13, with possible vendor demonstrations on July 17. The contact information for the RFI is Mel Keller of OSI’s Acquisition and Contracting Services Division. The phone number is (916) 263-0731 and the email address is solicitations@osi.ca.gov.
