There are four patient identifier fields in the CTC, LCSR and NMD registries:
- Social Security Number
- Old Medicare Beneficiary ID (in effect before April 2018)
- New Medicare Beneficiary ID (in effect after April 2018)
- “Other” ID (provided by the facility, usually MRN)
At least one is required. If you enter more than one, then every time you provide multiple patient identifiers for the same patient, they must match the identifiers you provided previously. If they don't match, you see an error like this when you hover over the field in error in the log file:
The error may be attached to any of the four patient identifier fields.
You can resolve this problem by looking up the patient identifiers associated with the NRDR patient ID, using the Manage Patients link. In the example above, the NRDR patient ID is 23759271. When we look up this patient ID, we see that at least one of the four patient identifiers matches the record on the file, but at least one does not.
Here is the record on the file:
And here are the patient identifiers from the Manage Patients link:
We are trying to add a record for Snow White with an "other ID" of 666B, but that ID has already been assigned to Teddy Bear.
If the record on the file and the record in Manage Patients are for the same patient, you can correct the error by changing the Manage Patients record to match the record on the file, or vice versa.
If the records are not for the same patient, then you can correct the error by
- Changing the matching patient ID (in the example, "other ID") on either record to something else, or
- Deleting the matching patient ID from one of the records.