We are an EMIS-LV general pactice. We have Anglia ICE integrated with EMIS-LV. Occasionally - when accessing the ICE reporting facility a patinet may have duplicate entried within the hospital pathology (and hence the ICE) database. I understand that the ICE administrator at the hospital can amalgamate these records. Is there any way we can easily flag up the presence of duplicate entries so that the pathology reports all figure under the same patient? Ideally we woul dlik eto be able to amalgamate the duplicate patients ourselves - but sending a message 9from within ICE) to the administrator would be very helpful. Thanks. Mike Walton GP St Albans

Hi Mike,

You are absolutely right when you describe the existance of duplicate patients within ICE. There are a huge number of reasons why this may occur and alot of them relate to the quality of data being input into the departmental systems which feed ICE. I don't think you are questioning the existence, you are asking for a simple way of notifying the administrator at the Trust.

The latest version of ICE has a facility called ICEMail which allows you to send an ICEMail relating to a specific report with any comment you wish to make. This would allow the recipient to know exactly which patient you are referring to as a link to the original report is included.

This may be a convenient way for you to notify the Trust whilst within the report you are concerned about.

If you require more information please feel free to contact the Trust or if you have no joy there - myself.

I hope that helps

Dominic

An excellent idea Dr Walton. As a trust system administrator of an ICE system hopefully going live in Spetember I would welcome such feedback from users. Duplicates within any system are a occupation hazard when the feeding system contains PID from a record that requires human intervention to create- whether that be when it is written out or keyed into the lab system. The lab people here undertake approx 200 patient merges PER DAY across all pathology disciplines so you can imagine the extent of the problem