Electronic directory of health care information

The method of facilitating communications relative to individual patients and enrollees between healthcare providers and third party payors, comprising:

• establishing a data index (Lockbox Index) containing records for each individual patient or enrollee identifying the associated providers and payors with healthcare information on that person (Contributors) and information necessary to communicate with such providers or payors, each record being identified by a hash value;
• translating representative information relating to individuals into hash values by operating upon the digital value of such information with an algorithm to obtain a hash value;
• and
• establishing a table of hash values and locations in the data index of records associated with those hash values;
• whereby healthcare providers and third party payors may interrogate the database using hash values related to individual representative information and derive the stored information in an individual anonymous form (Lockbox Index Report).

A system for anonymously storing and retrieving healthcare information related to an individual on an anonymous basis, comprising:

• a data index system comprising:
• a hash value generator (Lockbox Locator) for receiving individual identifying information relating to a patient, including the patient's name, and at least one additional item of individual identifying information;
• a data index (Lockbox Index) containing a plurality of records each storing information relating to an individual, the files being identified on a hash value basis;
• and
• a hash table relating hash values to locations in the data index;
• and
• a public network for providing the information relating to the individual to the hash function generator to generate a hash value that may be used to interrogate the hash table to locate a record in the data index storing information relative to that patient and to provide such information to an interrogating party (Lockbox Index Report).
• An electronic report (Lockbox Index Report) that provides the interrogating party (Requestors) with a listing of all the associated providers and payors with healthcare information on that person (Contributors) and information necessary to communicate with such providers or payors, each record being identified by a hash value.