The Patient Tab > Patient Management > Identifying Duplicate or Incomplete Patients

Identifying Duplicate or Incomplete Patients

When you access the summary for a patient, the patient identification area may display next to the patient’s name. This indicator means that the patient is either unknown (Care360 Labs & Meds, ePrescribing, or EHR cannot positively identify the patient, because his/her patient record is incomplete), or is a potential duplicate of another patient. To correct this condition, do one of the following:

• Edit the patient data. For more information, see Managing Patient Details.

• Resolve the duplicate patient. For more information, see Resolve Duplicate Patients .

Note: A patient indicator may also appear next to a patient name when accessing patients from other sections of Labs & Meds. For example, after performing a basic patient search, an indicator may appear next to patient names in the results list. For more information, see Adding a Patient.

How Duplicate Patients are Identified

To determine potential duplicate patients, patient demographic data is entered into the system manually or received electronically. A standardization algorithm is applied to rule out mistakes and common variances in this data. A “fuzzy” matching process then determines a set of potential matches based on the data. A matching process is applied against the potential matches.

Elements are compared to the corresponding data in the database. Demographic elements such as first name, last name, birth month, and birth date count more towards a positive match than elements such as street name, house number, city, and state. The system determines the probability of each element matching, and generates an overall statistic called the match value.

The match value system has high and low threshold points. If a match value exceeds the high threshold point, the patient already exists. A match value below the low threshold point means that a new patient must be created. If the match value falls between the threshold points, or if multiple patients exceed the high threshold, the patient is deemed “ambiguous.” Ambiguous patients are added to the Duplicate Patient list. For information, see Resolve Duplicate Patients .