4 ms·

Good reminder for developers to never treat a name or name/birthdate combo as a reliable primary key.

snowpanda 10y ago
On a related note. You'd be surprised how common this is in the healthcare industry. An industry where mistakes can be deadly.
- pmarreck 10y ago
  No technical clusterfuck in the healthcare industry seems to surprise me anymore All the technical problems are already solved, but as usual, it's politics and people and profit standing in the way
- lostlogin 10y ago
  You'd also be surprised how often the patient is trying to mislead. Immigration status, serious mental health issues and being wanted by the police are the three that have hit me (that I known of). It's particularly hard when there is intent to deceive.
vinhboy 10y ago
If any facebook developer is here today.. > She didn’t have the Facebook Messenger app; she’d never seen my messages. For goodness sake, fix this. This is a HUGE UX BUG in facebook. I've gotten plenty of important "hidden" messages from people through facebook. Don't let people send messages if you aren't going to show them to the receiver. This is a huge problem.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  I believe that if you don't have the app, Facebook sends you an email saying you have new Messenger message. I've never used Messenger, and this has happened to me.
  - kelnos 10y ago
    The problem isn't whether or not you have Messenger; the problem is that (as a spam prevention measure?), FB will blackhole messages sent to you by non-friends.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I've had an estranged family member and a job offer come to me through Facebook messages. They both ended up in the "other senders" section on the website - which I didn't even know existed for years. I read some news story on messages lost into that folder, checked it, and realized that major events in my life had disappeared into someone's shitty UX choice. I don't even know what to do about this - deleting my FB account might stop people from doing this, but it's far from guaranteed and any test I run now will be invalid as soon as the UX changes again.
sixothree 10y ago
I work in health care. I can't begin to tell you how many hours are spent at the beginning of any project that involves another system discussing patient matching. A simple unique identifier would change so much about healthcare.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  I work in a system that has that. It isn't the holy land you dream of. Yes, it helps but people forget it, have 2, have none and others transpose numbers, type a wrong value and generally ruin it. If there was a non creepy way of having an RFID embedded at birth...
- joshuaduffy 10y ago
  The format the NHS use is proven to work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_number

On a related note. You'd be surprised how common this is in the healthcare industry. An industry where mistakes can be deadly.

pmarreck 10y ago
No technical clusterfuck in the healthcare industry seems to surprise me anymore All the technical problems are already solved, but as usual, it's politics and people and profit standing in the way
lostlogin 10y ago
You'd also be surprised how often the patient is trying to mislead. Immigration status, serious mental health issues and being wanted by the police are the three that have hit me (that I known of). It's particularly hard when there is intent to deceive.

vinhboy 10y ago

If any facebook developer is here today.. > She didn’t have the Facebook Messenger app; she’d never seen my messages. For goodness sake, fix this. This is a HUGE UX BUG in facebook. I've gotten plenty of important "hidden" messages from people through facebook. Don't let people send messages if you aren't going to show them to the receiver. This is a huge problem.

lobster_johnson 10y ago
I believe that if you don't have the app, Facebook sends you an email saying you have new Messenger message. I've never used Messenger, and this has happened to me.
- kelnos 10y ago
  The problem isn't whether or not you have Messenger; the problem is that (as a spam prevention measure?), FB will blackhole messages sent to you by non-friends.
Bartweiss 10y ago
I've had an estranged family member and a job offer come to me through Facebook messages. They both ended up in the "other senders" section on the website - which I didn't even know existed for years. I read some news story on messages lost into that folder, checked it, and realized that major events in my life had disappeared into someone's shitty UX choice. I don't even know what to do about this - deleting my FB account might stop people from doing this, but it's far from guaranteed and any test I run now will be invalid as soon as the UX changes again.

sixothree 10y ago

I work in health care. I can't begin to tell you how many hours are spent at the beginning of any project that involves another system discussing patient matching. A simple unique identifier would change so much about healthcare.

lostlogin 10y ago
I work in a system that has that. It isn't the holy land you dream of. Yes, it helps but people forget it, have 2, have none and others transpose numbers, type a wrong value and generally ruin it. If there was a non creepy way of having an RFID embedded at birth...
joshuaduffy 10y ago
The format the NHS use is proven to work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_number