A method, apparatus and article of manufacture are provided to optimize the time and effort required to locate all data on a given entity that may span multiple data nodes in a distributed environment. For example, embodiments of the invention may be used to locate nodes within the distributed environment that store electronic healthcare records. A poll request from a first node to a second node may include electronic records existence data indicating data nodes known to have, or not have, records related to a given individual. This information is used to minimize the number of nodes that need to be polled to arrive at the complete aggregation of patient records that exist within a given set of nodes.