Re: [Gnumed-devel] type of search pattern for demographics

[J Busser]

At 11:02 PM +0200 8/21/04, Karsten Hilbert wrote:
>  >> O"Malley
> We don't currently support that to the best of my knowledge.
> Can you give a few examples and a bit of explanation ?
>
> >  > 2) spaces
> >  > de Groot
> It is rather tricky to get the semantics exactly right.
> What *are* those name parts ? Should we ignore them ? Are
> there others in the same category (eg. van, von, of, ...) ? Do
> we need a separate backend field for that name part ?

As stated by someone earlier, it is true in the example like deGroot 
vs. de Groot and maybe even da Groot (Spanish form???) one could 
instring search just on Groot.

For the case of apostrophe, I expect the Irish O' and French d' may 
be commonest. It is hard to know whether office staff and doctors 
would reliably enter the apostrophe or whether they might (though I 
doubt) use a quotation (") or, for those with much font knowledge and 
keyboard savvy, a curly apostrophe.

For the issue of capitalization and spaces we have
de (French, Dutch)
la (French)
le (French)
von (German)
van (Dutch)
Al and Al- (Arabic)
Au and Au- (Oriental e.g. Au-Yeung)

There are also combination van de (van De) and van der (van Der) as 
combining forms.

Then of course there are people with two-word last names, which may 
(or ambiguously, may not) be hyphenated.

You have already brought up the umlaut and then of course there are 
the french accents acute, grave and circumflex (sorry Dominique, I 
forget how to spell the french forms!).

This is further complicated because in some forms of identification 
and in some registries, there are can be limitations or errors on 
whether such things as punctuation/apostrophes, hyphens, accents or 
even correct spelling is carried through (e.g. in the printing of 
plastic cards). You may see a patient for the first time in the 
emergency room and take to the office information derived from the 
plastic cards used by the hospital to emboss paper records or may 
carry forward to your office a hospital error. Your patient at your 
next contact may provide you with their correct spelling. They may be 
unaware of or may have given up trying to get an insurer or 
government agency to fix incorrect spelling and may at times have to 
present an incorrect name or date of birth because it may be the one 
needed for eligibility and payment purposes.

And then of course we may have mis-spellings eg character reversal 
upon keyboard input in our own practices.

Sounds like Tim has been all through this.

There may be others but maybe it is not necessary to catalog every 
possible occurrence?

We might be most of the way there, for Western names anyway, for the search to:
- disregard case (iLike?)
- disregard accents (plain letters would need to be substituted for 
accented ones)
- disregard spaces (drop them; would cover  two and three part surnames)
- disregard punctuation (e.g. apostrophes and hyphens)

We could in addition optionally offer soundex searching per the url 
given by Syan which specifies dropping to vowels in order to extend 
the matches, this would cover the van/von and also the Mc/Mac 
challenge.

Tim's method sounds like it would extend to include letter reversals?

One question that I have is whether it is efficient to have all of 
this factored into a search function, or whether this will be slow 
and if it would be faster, at the time of creating or editing a 
patient name, for Gnumed to store a converted form of the names for 
search purposes. Surely it is faster to search a key or index file 
than it is to have to locate on the physical hard drive every name in 
order to evaluate? If the user were permitted to see how the name is 
proposed to be converted and stored for search purposes, people might 
wish to edit it to capture the misspelling used by official agencies 
or insurers in dealing with the patients (although if this 
essentially becomes an "alternate name" it may be better served 
through an "alias" function wherein we permit each patient to have 
multiple names as can happen with marriage/divorce as well as in 
other circumstances.