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Additional technical detail on the use of identifiers and matching can be found in our development wiki.
Supported configuration
PKB supports using the date of birth for soft matching, as this provides the appropriate level of data quality checking for when we receive HL7 messages. The rationale is that:
There is a hard matching requirement for a national and/or local identifier to be provided which is the primary mechanism for ensuring data is added to the correct patient record.
Given that the soft matching adds a further check to this, the use of Date of Birth alone adds a sufficient data checkpoint.
For a message to add data to the wrong patient it would have to match both the hard matching and the date of birth. The addition of further soft matching is unlikely to identify any message being sent for the wrong patient that wasn't prevented by these checks.
Date of birth is less likely to suffer from both errors in data entry and genuine updates. Therefore, using dob provides a robust additional data quality check with a reduced likelihood of messages being unnecessarily held for manual review by the Organisation Administrator.
FAQ
Will changing existing soft-matching rules, retrospectively apply that change to messages currently being held for a soft-match failure?
A: No, any change will only apply to HL7 messages received from the time of the change.Could PKB accept or reject all messages currently being held for soft-matching failures en masse?
A: Yes, that could be achieved. Please request via a FreshDesk ticket.Are there any complications or risks if messages are just re-sent (by the
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organisation) or approved en-masse from the HL7 review queue for processing (possibly just for the last 6 months)?
A: We would recommend clearing down the queue of messages being held for review prior to re-sending those messages. Beyond that, PKB has logic that handles the processing of received messages in the correct order where corrections or deletions are a consideration.Does soft-matching have to be applied?
A: No, this is an optional configuration setting