Pathway Analytics

How are Duplicate Records Handled in the Grouper?

A unique patient record is considered as the same Organisation ID, Patient ID, Clinic ID and Attendance Date

So if a patient attends the same clinic on the same date it is considered the same attendance no matter how many time the patient attends in that day.

If there is more than one instance of the same combination of Organisation Id, Patient ID, Clinic ID and Attendance Date in any month of data submitted then those records are merged into one using the following rules:

Where a field is populated in only one of the records, then that field remains in the merged record, where a field is populated in more than one of the duplicate records then the last record uploaded will remain in the merged record.  Where duplicates exist in the same uploaded file, then there is no predetermined order in which one record will take precedence over another.

For example, image two duplicate records, record 1 and record 2, with the same Organisation ID, Patient ID, Clinic ID and Attendance Date, but with the following SHHAPT fields:

In the File Uploads tab on the Grouper you can see the number of records from each file you upload are considered as unique, in the Accepted tab the total records figure shows the number of records uploaded in total including duplicates.  (This is a little counter intuitive and we are considering how to improve the display of this information).

Note:

Some data added before 1 Nov 2011 will not have been de-duplicated in this way (duplicates across multiple files uploaded in the same month will not have been recognised before Nov 2011).