# Merge Patients and their records

**URL:** <https://forum.communityhealthtoolkit.org/t/merge-patients-and-their-records/3305>\
**Category:** Feature Ideas\
**Created:** [February 3, 2024, 2:19pm UTC](https://forum.communityhealthtoolkit.org/t/merge-patients-and-their-records/3305 "2024-02-03T14:19:55Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mourice](https://communityhealthtoolkit.b-cdn.net/user_avatar/forum.communityhealthtoolkit.org/mourice/32/588_2.png) [@mourice](https://forum.communityhealthtoolkit.org/u/mourice)\
**Post date:** [February 3, 2024, 2:19pm UTC](https://forum.communityhealthtoolkit.org/t/merge-patients-and-their-records/3305/1 "2024-02-03T14:19:56Z")

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**Your Organization:** Medic

**Organization Type:** Technical

**What Other Organizations Would Benefit From This Feature:** I-TECH

**Describe the Feature:** As a data user I want to ensure that all my patient records are under the same patient so that I don’t have exaggerated denominators and also to ensure that I can rightly identify who requires or should have been provided with what kind of care.

**What “Pain Point” Does The Proposed Feature Address:**  
As CHT scales and there is need to integrate with other systems as well as cases where multiple users may attend to the same patient/contact the likelihood of experiencing multiple registered contacts for the same person are high. With the Cares project we have nurses registering patients as well as patient records being created from EMR data imports. We have cases of records for the same patient being created multiple twice and their records appearing as different people.

**Proposed Solution:**  
We would propose having a feature that allows for merging of contacts which will then enable records from the different contacts to be under the same patients. This will need to have clear consideration on the contact hierarchy i.e. need to specify who the new record will be assigned to.

**Do you have funding to cover external developers?**  
No

**Do You Have Resources (Designers, Developers, PMs) Available:**  
No

**Links To Supporting Information / Uploads:**  
Some examples on where this has been used

1. [Merge patient data Module - Documentation - OpenMRS Wiki](https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/docs/Mergepatientdata+Module)
2. The Data Management (Merge Patient Electronic Records) section on [this](https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/docs/Reference+Application+2.14.0) page has an illustration on a GUI that is used to merge patients.

@cfeld

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**Author:** ![niraj](https://communityhealthtoolkit.b-cdn.net/user_avatar/forum.communityhealthtoolkit.org/niraj/32/1330_2.png) [@niraj](https://forum.communityhealthtoolkit.org/u/niraj)\
**Post date:** [February 20, 2024, 12:53pm UTC](https://forum.communityhealthtoolkit.org/t/merge-patients-and-their-records/3305/2 "2024-02-20T12:53:24Z")

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Hi @Philip_Mwago just wondering any suggestions or thoughts regarding the feature request?

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**Author:** ![jkuester](https://communityhealthtoolkit.b-cdn.net/user_avatar/forum.communityhealthtoolkit.org/jkuester/32/806_2.png) [@jkuester](https://forum.communityhealthtoolkit.org/u/jkuester)\
**Post date:** [March 12, 2024, 2:18pm UTC](https://forum.communityhealthtoolkit.org/t/merge-patients-and-their-records/3305/3 "2024-03-12T14:18:04Z")

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Just want to note that this is related to this issue:

> <https://github.com/medic/cht-core/issues/6363>
>
> \*\*Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.\*\*
> \[This excell…ent report\](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TibEbmNiZPAr9PKHiBw0DTZn-KO2XHtOb6Q702caEBM/) by @marialma shows that duplicate contacts are an issue for a non-trivial amount of CHWs in some deployments. Maria has enumerated a large number of issues that arise for care delivery, privacy, and analytics from this. For example:
> 
> \- For client-initiated health assessment, duplicate contacts create issues of linking phone numbers to patients or households
> \- Recreating a patient who moves to a new household means that the CHT and analysts lose the history of that patient, which may impact care delivery (e.g., lose the context of a registered high risk pregnancy)
> 
> \*\*Describe the solution you'd like\*\*
> There are several potential solutions:
> 
> 1. When entering a new contact, search existing contacts for exact or extremely close (say, Levenshtein distance = 2) names and ask the CHW to confirm that they want to create a new contact.
> 2. Allow CHWs to "move" contacts between parent contacts (e.g., when someone moves to a new household within a catchment area)
> 3. For older deployments, let's say a data scientist sets up an entity matching service on the backend to identify likely duplicates, allow a CHW/supervisor to review and confirm duplicates and merge them (so that all documents become associated with the merged/new contact) and deconflict contact info (e.g., date of birth).
> 
> \*\*Describe alternatives you've considered\*\*
> There are likely some training solutions (e.g., advising CHWs of the problems created by duplicate contacts). But training will never address everything.
> 
> \*\*Additional context\*\*

Also, there has been additional forum discussion (but actually from the perspective of preventing the end-user from adding duplicate contacts) here:

> [@Mitigate duplicate data capture](https://forum.communityhealthtoolkit.org/t/mitigate-duplicate-data-capture/3313):
>
> We’ve run into an issue where our CHWs have started capturing duplicate entries. After some investigation it seems to be a multi faceted problem. We used a version of CHT that had the 50 contact limit, limiting work visibility. Users were on-boarded & trained with minimal data, possibly being unaware just how much the list items will grow and how to work through that in the UI. Users weren’t initially trained to use the “search everything bar” at the top. Users sometimes create an entry as a …