MBI as a parameter to fetch patient details?
Mujahid Ahmed Aamir M
Kirsten Hansen
Hi Mujahid,
When Medicare enrollees authenticate the sharing of their data via a Blue Button 2.0 API, they can choose if they want to share their demographic/personal data or not (the /patient endpoint, which includes MBI). For an example of what this choice looks like to end users, you can view the first screenshot visible in our documentation here. This means that app developers cannot count on always being able to call the /patient endpoint and getting an MBI back. Because of this, you can’t fetch patient details using MBI directly via the API.
Instead of using MBI, the API uses a Patient ID that can be used to query a specific enrollee. This Patient ID is returned in the /ExplanationOfBenefit, /Patient, /Coverage and /userinfo endpoints. It’s also returned with the access token response after the patient authenticates via Medicare.gov.
For Medicare enrollees that do wish to share their personal data (/patient endpoint), we create an internal MBI-Patient ID mapping. As an app developer, you would have to keep track of the mapping between MBI to patient ID and access token if you have both.
For example, if you are using an access token for a patient with the ID -19990000000001, you could use the following calls listed in our documentation to get the MBI information (note this information is for v2 endpoint only):
HTTP GET {baseURL}/Patient
Here the patient ID is derived from the access token used.
HTTP GET {baseURL}/Patient/{id} or HTTP GET {baseURL}/Patient/-19990000000001
Here you are explicitly providing the patient ID.
In the case that the enrollee doesn’t allow demographic information to be shared, and the /Patient endpoint is not accessible, the Patient ID will still be available in the /ExplanationOfBenefit endpoint to ensure the correct claims data is being delivered.
For additional information, take a look at our documentation on Calling the API.
Sincerely,