Cambodia is laying the groundwork for a unified patient identity. A national identifier will help link records in future, but it will not clean up the ones hospitals already hold. Here is how to get ready now.
Ask any registration desk in a busy hospital how many times the same patient appears in their system, and the honest answer is usually "more than once". A patient registers at one site under one spelling, returns a year later with a different phone number, visits a sister clinic where their name is transliterated differently, and has laboratory results filed under yet another variation. None of this is unusual. It is what happens in every health system that grew up one facility and one programme at a time.
Cambodia is now working to change that. At a European Chamber of Commerce in Cambodia (EuroCham) forum in May 2026, the Deputy Director of the Ministry of Health's Department of Digital Health stressed that a unified patient identity system is a foundational component of any integrated digital healthcare ecosystem.1 Several pieces of work point in that direction, and they give hospitals, clinics and laboratories a clear reason to start preparing.
This article explains what is taking shape and sets out five steps providers can take before a unified patient identifier arrives. It is written for private hospital groups, clinic chains and laboratories, and for the hospital information system (HIS), electronic medical record (EMR) and laboratory information system vendors who support them. It builds on our earlier pieces, Cambodia's Digital Health Reset and NSSF Claims Go Digital.
Three developments matter most. The first is technical. The Ministry of Health's Cambodia Digital Health Enterprise Architecture (CamDHEA) technical working group has published an early draft (version 0.1.0) of a national FHIR implementation guide. FHIR, or Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, is the international standard for exchanging health data. The guide defines a client registry, a shared service that keeps one master record for each person and links the identifiers they carry. It lists eleven identifier types: a Health ID, the Khmer Identification Code, the Khmer ID card number, identifiers from the HIV, tuberculosis (TB), antenatal care (ANC) and immunisation (EPI, the Expanded Programme on Immunization) programmes, the Patient Management and Registration System (PMRS), the Health Equity Fund (HEF), the National Social Security Fund (NSSF), and others.2
Figure 1. The identifier types listed in Cambodia's draft client registry guide, grouped by source.
The second is a pilot. The Ministry of Health, funded by the Asian Development Bank under the Greater Mekong Subregion Border Areas Health Project, sought consultants to demonstrate a unique health identifier with biometric identification, alongside an electronic personal health record, including a mobile application for migrant workers. The work was due to start in May 2026 and run for 24 months.3
The third is national identity reform beyond health. The Ministry of Interior's General Department of Identification, supported by the United Nations Development Programme, is working towards "One Person, One Identity", shaping a National Strategic Plan of Identification for 2026 to 2035.4
Taken together, these signal where Cambodia is heading: towards a model in which each person's records can be reliably linked across hospitals, programmes and payers. That model only works if the records being linked are accurate in the first place.
Most providers hold more identity data than they realise, spread across registration, billing, laboratory and programme systems. One system holds a local medical record number, another holds an NSSF number, a third holds a programme identifier, and paper files may hold the Khmer ID card number that never made it into any system. Before you can link anything, you need to know what you have and where it lives.
Duplicates are created at the front desk, so that is where prevention starts. Inconsistent capture is the most common cause: a name typed in Latin script one day and Khmer script the next, a date of birth recorded in different formats, or a phone number used in place of an identifier. Khmer names can be transliterated into Latin script in several ways, so the same person can easily appear as two.
Once capture is consistent, the next step is to deal with the duplicates already in your systems. This needs care. Merging two different people into one record is far more dangerous than leaving a duplicate in place, because it can attach someone else's allergies, results or medications to the wrong patient. Good practice combines clear matching rules with human review of uncertain cases, and keeps an audit trail so any merge can be reversed.
Figure 2. An illustrative example: three records for one patient, merged and linked with care.
When a national or payer identifier becomes available, it is tempting to replace your local record number with it. Resist that. Your local number connects years of history inside your own systems. The better approach is the one a client registry uses: keep your local identifier and link it to the others, so each record can be found by any of them without losing anything.
The final step is to prepare for exchange. As the national client registry and enterprise architecture take shape, systems that can represent patients and their identifiers in FHIR will connect more easily. Identity data is also personal data. Cambodia's draft Law on Personal Data Protection treats health data as sensitive and includes a right to data portability,5 so consent, access controls and clear purposes for linking records need to be built in from the start.
Figure 3. Five steps from what you hold today to a connected record.
It is reasonable to ask whether providers should simply wait for a national identifier and let it solve the problem. In our experience, it does not work that way. A new identifier links records going forward. It does not tell you which of your existing three records for the same person is correct, and it cannot merge them for you. The organisations that benefit most from a national identity layer are those whose records are already clean enough to link.
The work also pays off long before any national system goes live. Fewer duplicates mean safer care, because clinicians see the full history. They mean fewer NSSF claim queries, because patient details match the member record. And they mean more reliable reporting, because each patient is counted once. Laboratories gain as well: results reach the right record the first time, rather than being filed against a near match. Identity matching can be supported by AI at scale, and we use it ourselves, but because an incorrect merge carries real clinical risk, uncertain matches always need human review.
Not yet in full. The Ministry of Health has described a unified patient identity as foundational, an early draft national FHIR guide includes a Health ID among the identifiers a client registry would link, and a Ministry pilot of a unique health identifier with biometric identification was due to begin in 2026.
A client registry is a shared service that keeps one master record for each person and links the different identifiers they carry across hospitals, programmes and payers, so their records can be brought together reliably.
It is the Ministry of Health's blueprint for how digital health systems in Cambodia should fit together, being developed with support from the World Health Organization alongside a five-year action plan for 2026 to 2030.
No. A national identifier will help link records in future, but it will not clean up the duplicates and inconsistencies hospitals already hold. Cleaning and linking records now makes the transition easier and improves care and claims today.
If the patient details in a hospital record do not match the National Social Security Fund member record, the claim cannot be paid until the mismatch is resolved. Consistent identity data is one of the simplest ways to reduce claim queries.
Getting patient identity right is quiet, careful work, and it underpins everything else Cambodia is building. There are two ways we can support you.
This article is for general information and is not legal advice. The national FHIR guide referenced is an early draft and may change.
Suhina Singh is a physician, the Founder and CEO of Jonda Health, and a health data strategist working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and clinical information systems.
