It’s the middle of the night and there is confusion about the identity of a patient in the ER.  A new registration number is created for a patient that has already been registered before.  No one notices that there are now 2 medical records for this patient in the medical center EMR/EHR system. Healthcare staff are confused when accessing the patient in the EMR/EHR system since there are two possible records to pull up on the screen.  Some lab, cardiology, and radiology orders are placed on one number and some orders are placed on the other number.  When the results come back, some don't file in the EMR/EHR system because the results are on the wrong patient number. Unfortunately, this is all too common a scenario in today's complicated Medical Center Environments and this incident will require careful investigation and appropriate merging of patients records.

What if there was a way to alert medical staff immediately when this situation occurs?  What if there was a way to avoid this waste of everyone's time?  Now there is.  By passively monitoring all inbound ADT messages into Ensemble, Duplicate Medical Record Detector will identify the potential duplicate records and send a page/email alert to all registration staff that a potential duplicate has just occurred. The staff can pull up the two numbers, identify the duplicate, and flag the duplicate number so that no orders are placed against it. No need to wait for suspected duplicates reports to find these problems after the damage is done - get notification real time and take action as duplicates happen.  

Each email message contains the duplicate identifiers and the most recently received patient information for each of the duplicate identifiers. Default rules are fully configurable for multiple inbound interfaces (for situations where there may be more than one ADT source) and can be easily modified for the unique requirements of the medical center environment (settings screen is shown below). 

Whether you use the email feature or not, you can always pull up the Unresolved Suspected Duplicates Report (see screen below).  This report shows all unresolved/unmerged duplicates with the longest standing suspected duplicates at the top and the newest suspected duplicates at the bottom (default sort - click on any column title to sort by that title). When merges occur and the HL7 merge messages flow to Ensemble, the Duplicate Medical Record Detector utility automatically removes the resolved duplicates from the report. You can mask any suspected duplicates if they turn out not to be true duplicates (see screen below). If you make a mistake, you can then unmask the suspected duplicate that was previously masked.  If you have a large number of duplicates, use the filter feature to see only the duplicates of interest. 

Also, keep track of the duplicates that were merged in your EMR/EHR system with the Merged Duplicates Report (see screen below).  Layout and features similar to the Unresolved Suspected Duplicates Report.

Use Duplicate Medical Record Detector at your medical center to Increase the accuracy of your EMR/EHR system - decrease the risk of patient treatment errors at your medical center with this tool.