I have a strange situation that just showed up.
I have 3 instances of 2 patients having the same pid in finder.
When i check the database, the patients all have different pid’s
In the database the “pubpid” and “pid” fields don’t match on 1 patient out of each pair.
It appears as though “pubpid” is what finder is using. Will it cause any harm to set the “pubpid” to the same as the “pid” on the patients that have non-matching number?
Also, does anyone know how this could have happened? I want to fix something if there is something to be fixed?
Sounds like a user or users might’ve changed or accidentally deleted and miss re-input it in demographics That’d be my guess
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I dug in deeper on the issue. It appears as though 1% of the patients have different pubpid and pid numbers. Most of the instances are from back when we were using version 5 of open emr.
For some reason in the past, the pubpid on a handful of patients got set at a higher number then the pid. The instances that caused a problem today are a situation where the pubpid from an older patient with the different pid matched the pubpid and pid of a new patient.
It appears as thought all the medical records go off of the pid. So changing the pubpid doesn’t seem to have any affect on the records themselves or in the relationship of the record to the patient.
The public pid is a loose field meant to have a more user/human readable MRN instead of trying to communicate using integers like hey my MRN is 1!
When first set, if there isn’t a mask setup in Config, then the records pid is used. After that, I don’t know of anywhere the system touches/changes. Users do play with that field to see what it does and then scare themselves and returns the value but many times they forget and guess.
Check out mask and ensure it’s empty
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I checked the section you referenced. We don’t have any mask for patient id’s set. It appears as though these got changed at some point for who knows what reason.
I changed them to be the same as the pid which is what the other several thousand patient records have. Everything seems to be working fine.
Thanks for your help and info.
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