Abstract
Identification codes for filing of medical records may be generated from “wild” variables such as name, birth date, and place of birth. In designing a scheme for a particular application, it is important to determine the probability of generating identical codes for different people. A simplified method of computing this probability is derived in the text. It is also shown that for a population of any reasonable size an identification system predicated on the occurrence of no redundancies whatsoever is generally impractical because of the large number of identification variables it would require. A better solution would be to establish an expected ratio of redundancy, and to build methods coping with redundancy into the system.
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Selected References
These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.
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