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Adrian Midgley wrote:
>>>
>>> Name, sex and DoB narrows it down pretty thoroughly.
>>> Adding part of an address already heads toward uniquity.
I had at one time three patient doublets with major confusion risk:
A set of twins where the parents in their wisdom had chosen first names
which transliterated identically into Latin script (though they were
vastly different in the parents' script). As the names pronounced to a
European ear pretty similar too, confusion reigned wildly. Same address
obviously.
A set of non-twin siblings with identical first names, different but
extremely similar middle names and same DOB - being born presumably in
the begin and the end of the same year in a country without valid birth
registers - they had acquired the same DOB on official UK records:
1/1/whatever. They shared a flat for a while.
Two same-gendered patients with no relation to each other whatsoever,
identical first name, same birth year, DOB expressed in UK registers as
1/1/whatever and being part of an ethnic group where only two surnames
are in use - one for the male gender the other for the female gender. As
they lived in flats with the same relative position (flat/floor) in a
place full of identically looking tower blocks named as XXX square, XXX
terrace and XXX view you can imagine the confusion.
Yes, and they all registered around the same time...
One of the lessons I took from this is that paper records are vastly
superior both in preventing of and in dealing with human error to
anything I have so far seen in computer records - though it should
really be the other way round.
The other lesson is that DOB works only as a reasonably distinguishing
identifier in people born in Western(ised) societies.
Incidentally latter lesson was one, I am told, which pushed proper
randomisation in clinical trials in Germany: Up to a point in German
history one could create reasonably pseudo-randomised groups by dividing
test subjects into odd and even DOB groups - until the late 60s/early
70s when suddenly larger number of immigrants came to Germany who often
had a DOB expressed as 1/month/year or even as 1/1/year. Suddenly the
"odd" group was predominantly immigrant.
Peter
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