We are planning some improvements here to make hard and soft matching consistent across flows. Please subscribe to our blog to receive updates.
Matching in UI (‘Add patient’ page)
When creating a patient through the UI (‘Add patient’ form in PKB) PKB looks for existing records by checking in the following order :
National Identifier
Organisational Identifier or Team Identifier
Email
See How to create a new patient record to see the workflow in each of these situations.
1. If a National Identifier is provided and there is an existing record with that National Identifier then that is considered a match.
All other demographic data will be ignored and no updates will be done for mismatches (including email address).
2. If an Organisation ID or Team ID is entered (without a National Identifier) and there is an existing record ID /ID type combination then that is considered a match.
All demographic data will be ignored and no demographic updates will be done for mismatches (including email address).
3. If an email address is provided (without any identifiers) and there is an existing record with that email address then that is considered a match.
We will check for other patients in the same organisation who have the same last name and DOB. We display these to the user and ask them to confirm that they still want to create the patient.
For example, you have a patient record with a National or Organisation ID saved in your Organisation. You are trying to create a new patient record using their email address, DOB and last name and they match the record saved with a National or Organisation ID. The following message will prompt you to check if you wish to create a new record or use the existing one.
Matching patient records - CSV bulk upload
PKB matches using the same algorithm as above. National, Organisational or Team identifier is mandatory during bulk csv upload so email address match does not apply here. Matching outcomes are fed back in the csv outcome report see How do I bulk create new patient records? for details
Matching in the HL7 message flow
Matching rules can be found on our development pages here