Identifying a patient

We ask patients to enter their DOB, with an optional mobile number follow-up. Initials can be requested too.

Brendan Kilfoil avatar
Written by Brendan Kilfoil
Updated over a week ago

DOB or mobile number?

The first step to checking someone in is to identify who is actually checking in. Patient privacy was a major consideration for us in trying to figure out who the patient is, so exposing patient names and letting them choose from a list was not an option.

Instead, we ask them for certain details, and then try match these details with an appointment for the day. Here's the info that can be requested to match to an appointment:

  1. An initial request for their date of birth or their mobile number.

  2. (optional) fall-back of either date of birth or mobile number (whatever wasn't chosen as the primary method above)

  3. (optional) request for initials — the first letter of the first, last, or both names.

Again, we'll check all appointments for the day to see if there's a match with the entered information. Here's an example flow:

Matching appointments

Most of the time there will only be a single match, but on the rare occasion there may be more than one (i.e. if two patients with the same date of birth have appointments on the same day at about the same time – rare, but possible).

If we find a corresponding appointment, we then ask the patient to choose an appointment that matches: a) their initials, b) the appointment time, and c) which practitioner they're here to see. 

Again, we're not exposing a patient name at this point because we want to confirm we've got the right patient.

(B.K. are the initials of the patient)

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