Prompt for duplicate patient match when entering appointment

[matt_ackerman]

The prompt warning of a possible duplicate patient needs to appear when an appointment is entered (when walkin is created) not when a walk-in is converted.

• We've tried to imbed the thought for all schedulers to search for existing patients before making an appointment and we still end up with duplicate patients or patients with the same name including middle initials.  It should prompt to confirm DOB or SSN.
• We see a lot of married women who don't mention that they've been to the practice before (even though we ask) - they sometimes forget or don't realize that this office is the same practice as another office; naturally, their last name has changed since we last saw them.
• Worst is if you enter a walkin and do notice the patient is a duplicate if you select the existing patient you lose all the updated information and have to ask for it again.  Is there a way to pull up the existing patient without losing all the data you just entered?
• If there could be a way to merge accounts when duplicates are accidentally created...
• This especially needs to happen with automated registration, even if it does not match exactly maybe the patient put in the middle initial and the office didn't.  We have so many duplicate patients, it really throws our statistics off.  
• Something that has helped our office is to enter a birthdate when an office calls before scheduling an appointment which alerts operator to a patient who has been in before and maybe does not remember.

[pksaari79]

Something like that would be a wonderful addition. We try to doulble check but patients with rhe name of Smith or children with their parents names can cause confusion, but things happen.

[tsofs]

We, too, have tried to enforce the schedulers to look up ALL patients by their birthdate, to cut down on the duplicating patient charts.  An alert that matches potential patients would be great!

[ajohnson87]

We unfortunately have had quite a few duplicated accounts and having the option to either search our own criteria or to have the system also search those of the same DOB/SSN would help reduce the number of duplicates. The issue of hyphenated names is what causes quite a few of our duplicates as we enter the last name in as hyphenated but the patient does their online registration and leaves the hyphen out or only puts one of their two lasts names not allowing us to link those accounts together. We've learned to adjust their name to how it appears on their registration then adjust accordingly once it's converted but it makes more steps and clicks then an easy conversion.