Question
Why do I sometimes see what appear to be duplicate persons in the platform?
Answer
The reason it's possible to see what appear to be duplicate persons comes down to data accuracy and mastering (learn more).
Example: A record was loaded to the platform from a new mover data set; however, there isn't enough accurate information on the record to confidently match (master) it with an existing person's record. The result is there are now two (2) persons in the database:
- One from a new mover
- The other existing (e.g., from Epic EHR data).
But if you know this happens, why don’t you do something about it?
Great question and this answer has to do with which type of error is more acceptable:
- Merging two records that aren’t really the same person (over-merging)
- Failing to merge two records that are the same person (under-merging)
In healthcare, more than other industries, the best practice is to prevent the situation outlined in 1 above - over-merging. It is considered a much larger error to merge two persons’ protected health information (PHI) than to create duplicate records where they are actually the same person. Because WebMD Ignite follows these industry best practices, it is expected that some level of human detectable duplication will occur.
What else can happen when there are duplicate persons?
While rare, duplicate person records can cause a variety of things to happen. When these occur, they can lead to client questions.
- I set this person to do-not-solicit but they received a communication from me anyway!
- As do-not-solicit requests also follow matching rules, it is possible that these requests get applied to one person record, but not a “duplicate”.
- I got a call from an angry patient because they just got a direct mail piece for their mother who passed away at the same health system that sent her the mail!
- In this case, we either never received the deceased indication from the health system EHR or we received another record for the mother that failed to match the EHR record. As all records are also enhanced for deceased (learn more), this further requires that the record also failed to match the deceased master index.
