Search function produces illogical results

Day-to-Day Users
1

I just want to flag up a potential bug, or at least a function which does not work in the most helpful way, unless I am missing something, which is as likely as not.

So, I want to find a patient so I put the patient’s surname or first name in the search box and click to search. A list of patients is produced which does indeed contain my patient, but I would expect:

(1) The list to contain only patients with that name, whereas actually it contains many patients without that name and for whom there seems to be no logical reason for them to be in the list at all.

(2) Given the above, all patients with the name I search for should appear at the top of the list, but actually that doesn’t happen.

(3) Given the above, I would at least expect the list to have some kind of order, say alphabetical order or in order of how recently they have been last seen, but I can discern no logical order at all.

Sometimes the list is quite long, and names appear to be scattered randomly about the list. Consequently, it is more time-consuming to find my patients’ records than it should be.

This issue has been persistent through recent OpenEMR versions. I hope it will be resolved in the forthcoming version 8.0.0.

Edit: I am using Version 7.0.3(4).

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Hi @rdh61, I understand your frustration but haven’t been able to reproduce a search error. Nice to hear from you.

3

On further investigation, I find that this happens when I lazily use the search box at top right. But when I use the patient finder tab it does indeed work as expected. And further, I have found out the logic of what happens with the search box at top right. It was my stupid assumption that it would know by some kind of ESP that the name I put in was a part of the person’s name, whereas of course it searches for all instances of that name in all fields. For example, I was searching for the surname “Torres”, which is a common surname where I live, but it is also common in names of streets and buildings. So a list of patients is produced for which in some field of their record the name “Torres” appears, although this is not apparent in the list. Sorry to have wasted your time.

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