Healthcare Information Exchange Networks (HIEN) enables the exchange of medical information between different institutions. One of the biggest problems running a HIEN is the unique identification of the care providers like hospitals, health care professionals and so on. The solution to address this issue is the Provider and Organization Registry Service (PORS).

Similar to a Master Patient Index (MPI) PORS provides a unique Identifier for care providers. Within PORS a health care organization (HCO) like a hospital or a practice can be registered. Also a health care professional (HPC) can be registered with his demographics. A HPC can be assigned to one more HCOs. By querying PORS it can be figured out the unique ID of a HPC, HCO and to which organizations a HPC belongs to.

PORS is designed to fit into IHE based XDS compliant environments and the PORS Queries are based on HL7 V2 Syntax.

More information is available at: http://www.openehealth.org/display/PORS