Managing patient merge
summary
Duplicate patient records appear in every institution at variable rates—4–5% duplicate rate is typical though vendors sometimes cite up to 20%. Published estimates put duplicate cost at about $2,000 per inpatient and targets as low as 0.5%. FHIR offers patient.link and a linkage resource but documentation is inconsistent and the spec does not specify merge functionality. Implementations currently return 404, 200-with-replacement, or 304 redirects after merges; redirects are discouraged. Merging requires server-side find-and-rewrite of references and unmerge is messy once new data is added.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:46Patient merge
- 8:19Two approaches
- 10:36HL7 V2ATT
- 12:04Patient Resource
- 13:00Relationships
- 16:14Patient Resources
- 17:37Patient Documentation
- 20:32Merge Patients
- 22:50Community input
- 24:44Patient merge example
- 27:20Patient merge operation
- 29:46Questions
- 32:40Observations
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