Data Reveal Top Causes of Duplicate Records

April 7, 2017

Duplicate medical records are one of the most dangerous and costly problems in patient access, but finding the root cause can be surprisingly difficult.

Researchers examined the underlying causes of duplicate records using a multisite data set of 398,939 patient records with confirmed duplicates.¹ Some key findings of the analysis, which examined reasons for data discrepancies between those record matches, include:

• the field that had the greatest proportion of mismatches was the middle name, accounting for 58.30% of mismatches;

• the Social Security number was the second most frequent mismatch, occurring in 53.54% of the duplicate pairs;

• most mismatches in the name fields were the result of misspellings (53.14% in first name and 33.62% in last name), or swapped last name/first name, first name/middle name, or last name/middle name pairs.