Identification Codes for Medical Records
AUTOR(ES)
Yoder, Richard D.
RESUMO
Identification codes for filing of medical records may be generated from “wild” variables such as name, birth date, and place of birth. In designing a scheme for a particular application, it is important to determine the probability of generating identical codes for different people. A simplified method of computing this probability is derived in the text. It is also shown that for a population of any reasonable size an identification system predicated on the occurrence of no redundancies whatsoever is generally impractical because of the large number of identification variables it would require. A better solution would be to establish an expected ratio of redundancy, and to build methods coping with redundancy into the system.
