The Record Locator Service (RLS) maintains an index of the locations of patient records for each person in the system. Clinical information is never sent to the RLS. Furthermore, the RLS only stores secured, blinded demographic information necessary for record linking. When a patient is registered with an institution, a query is submitted to the RLS. The RLS returns the location of any matching records. A location consists of a site identifier and a record identifier specific to the remote site.

We believe that the centralized store of accessible demographic information employed by most RHIO implementations creates an unacceptable security risk for any RHIO. Because of this security issue CareEvolution has implemented its Identity Management services using a secured, blinded, crypto-hashed record linking service.

Blinded Record Linking Service - The core work of the RLS, the actual record linking, is performed by the Blinded Record Linking Service. The Blinded Record Linking Service implements an incremental probabilistic matching algorithm to link each record added to the Blinded Record Index with the existing records in the index.