Merge Patients and their records

jkuester · March 12, 2024, 2:18pm

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

Prevent and/or merge duplicate contacts

opened 04:38PM - 18 Apr 20 UTC

Type: Feature

**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: