Chip: I have always tried doing at the point of data entry. Obviously no code is perfect, and either is the object between the keyboard and the chair. My experience is that few Administrators would take the time to filter through duplicates. Getting them to do system maintenance was almost impossible. They had too many other responsibilities. Typically they only worked on this if a problem was identified. For that we have a built in record merger.
Application: Medical If a phone number is associated with the record for an individual - then I will use that. How it is implemented depends on the application (even within the application). Lets say I am adding in a person. They enter in a name (which is not that good as people will call themselves by different names). I remember one patient that would present with a different name (About 6 personalities) in a walk in clinic. If a new record was going to be created they would try and get a phone number from the patient. When the phone number was put in a dialog would come up displaying all the names of people with the same phone number. It let the staff (if they ‘felt like it’) to try and filter for duplicates at that point. For those staff that were diligent it prevented many duplicates in the medical data base. We had clinics that had 420,000 ‘regular’ patients. Then they had a walk in that had another 500,000 irregular patients. Their Administration was more eager to keep the duplicates down. We also used the Health Insurance Number as another indicator. Not all patient’s would present with their health care card though. With ‘universal’ health care it is not as critical. Application: National Order / Deliver Desk We do the same in Canada for Postal Code and Street name With a national order delivery system we had the addresses divided up so that we could look up Postal Codes (Canada) by address. This was also used for keeping duplicates down. This is when I learned that in Canada Postal Codes change weekly (nationally - there are postal codes changing somewhere). Looking in your system for unique or even semi-unique data can be used to help keep duplicates down. In the medical system we let them have a picture in the patient’s record that was presented (if security settings permitted) at the time of entry to the facility. Those are the ones that I have used. Jody Jody Bevan ARGUS Productions Inc. Developer Argus Productions Inc. <https://www.facebook.com/ArgusProductions/> > On Aug 8, 2017, at 8:25 AM, Chip Scheide via 4D_Tech <4d_tech@lists.4d.com> > wrote: > > Jody, > what are your normal duplicate reducing/removal technic(s)? ********************************************************************** 4D Internet Users Group (4D iNUG) FAQ: http://lists.4d.com/faqnug.html Archive: http://lists.4d.com/archives.html Options: http://lists.4d.com/mailman/options/4d_tech Unsub: mailto:4d_tech-unsubscr...@lists.4d.com **********************************************************************
