About the E-PIX®

In order to be able to merge research data from several projects and studies and assign them to the respective person, record linkage and a unique system-wide identifier are required. In addition to the management of personally identifiable information (PII), it must also be possible to assign the individual local identifiers of the source systems (e.g. laboratories, study centers, etc.). Since PII can be incomplete or incorrect (typos, number errors, etc.), error-tolerant and traceable record linkage is required. All these tasks are performed by the identity management.

The Identity Management E-PIX® enables a probabilistic Record Linkage and implements the concept of a Master Patient Index (unique identifier). The identity concept of E-PIX® allows the management of multiple identities (characteristics e.g. by different spellings) to one person. This makes it possible to detect potential synonym errors (duplicates) automatically even with different spellings and supports in their resolution.

Detection of duplicates is based on freely definable parameters. It is possible to choose between several distances (e.g. Levenshtein distance) or to customize. Possible synonym errors are thus logged and can be resolved afterwards via corresponding functions of the E-PIX®.

In case of multi-site research projects and due to the associated requirement of special protection of personal identities, the E-PIX® enables a Privacy Preserving Record Linkage (PPRL). Thus, PII can be encoded and be made available for a PPRL, as well as the encoded data can be compared with each other via different procedures.

Additional Information

License: AGPLv3
Copyright: 2009 - 2024 Trusted Third Party of the University Medicine Greifswald
Contact: Form

Concept and implementation: Lars Geidel
Web-Client: Arne Blumentritt, Frank-Michael Moser
Docker: Ronny Schuldt
Bloom Filter: Christopher Hampf

User Manual

The current version of the user manual (German) for the E-PIX® is here available

API

All functionalities of E-PIX® are provided for external use via SOAP-interface, which is available from http://IP-ADDRESS:8080/epix/epixService?wsdl. Further information and sample-requests are part of the user manual. The complete API description is available from https://ths-greifswald.de/epix/doc.

Note

The E-PIX® was developed by the University Medicine Greifswald (Institute for Community Medicine) since 2009 and published in 2014 as part of the MOSAIC Project (funded by the DFG HO 1937/2-1).
Selected functionalities of the E-PIX® were developed as part of the following research projects:

  • MIRACUM (funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research 01ZZ1801M)
  • NUM-CODEX (funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research 01KX2021)

Please cite our publications: