Merge Patients

If you discover you have duplicate patient records, and the records all have the same patient name, you can use the Merge Patients function to remove the duplicates and re-link all existing exam forms to a single patient ID.  You must be a Registry Administrator or Facility Administrator to perform this function.

Access the function by clicking the Resolve Duplicates button on the Manage Patients page:

For example, assume there is a single patient with three separate patient ID's in the NRDR patient dictionary:

• Patient ID 11111, has 2 exams in LCSR

• Patient ID 22222, has 3 exams

• Patient ID 33333, has 1 exam

The Merge Patients function allows you to choose one patient record, for example,  11111, into which the other records will be consolidated. The merge function also propagates patient ID 11111 to the exam form records for patients 22222 and 33333, so that all exams have patient ID 11111.

To merge records, first search for the duplicate records using the filter and appropriate criteria, as needed.

Next, select each record to be merged by clicking the box in the first column and then click the Merge Patients button.

The selected patients are listed. Select the one patient record into which you want to merge all other patient records.

Be sure to review all field values across all records to be merged. The Merge Patients function does not identify differences in field values across records. In the example above, patient ID 24303514 will be merged into 24303513, even though the OtherIDs are different. Effectively, this means all records in all registries for these patient records will now have patient ID 24303513 and OtherID TB1.

Click Confirm Merge Patients to process the request. A confirmation message appears. Click Yes to proceed or No to cancel the operation.

Once processing is completed, the screen refreshes and displays a message confirming that the records were merged successfully.

If the records you want to merge have different patient names, you can change the names to match so that they will show up in the "Resolve Patient Duplicates" list. Alternatively, you can use the upload function described in the Merge Patients Upload link. This function is also useful when you have a large number of patients to merge.