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PKB Merging

PKB Merging

Owned by George Swinnerton
Jan 21, 2022
1 min read

In some situations, usually those where a patient has more than one NHS numbers, files may be rejected with errors similar to -

  • Unexpected error while processing: Lookup single patient found more than one match by nationalId matches: [7554, 7676]

  • Parsing or validation error: Ambiguous patient IDs provided

 

In this situation you need to e-mail PKB ( help@patientsknowbest.com ) giving the error message and the start of the PID block.

For example -

PID|||1111111111^^^NHS Scotland^NH~42222222222^^^NHS^NH PID|||22222222222^^^NHS^NH~111111111111^^^NHS Scotland^NH

Do NOT send the rest of the demographics from the line.

 

Do not resend the messages until the helpdesk have replied back.

 

They may reply giving details of the two records at their end for example -

“Both these patients were created via HL7, 1hr apart. Our guess is that the second message (with the NHS) created a new record because it was not able to find the first due to an address mismatch. To resolve this we will need to remove one of the national IDs and then you can update the remaining record with the just-removed national ID.”

and wanting to know which should be deleted.

In this situation use the viewer to find the details for the patient and see which record was most recently received. In the absence of any other information this should be the record to use.