> All MRNs should be unique and everything else can be a duplicate. > Every system should support name changes and merges. John Does come in all the time, and

> All MRNs should be unique and everything else can be a duplicate. > Every system should support name changes and merges. John Does come in all the time, and then you figure out their existing MRN, or their real name. In theory yes, I’d hope to see that across the board, but fat fingering happens way too often on top of the reuse of mrn’s. I work in the IHE space, so I can point fingers at most of the big guys as we accept their HL7/CDA feeds and not even ids from the same system are consistent between the formats. I don’t want to get too off topic with that last line, but yeah we try to consolidate records that are received by leveraging Fellegi-Sunter[0]. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_linkage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_linkage