Table 7.

Additional Trends Suggested by Results That Were Different from Those of the 2007 Unpublished Just Associates Study

Field Category	Key Trends	Explanations
Last Name	There were fewer typographical errors and misspellings. There were twice as many pairs with completely different LNs.	Possibly due to more compound names
First Name	Different names are more frequent than they used to be. FN and LN swaps are 10 times more frequent than the previous study showed.	Prevalence of nicknames Registrar not being cognizant of data field being entered
Middle Name	MN differences are much higher. Analysis of blanks in MN decreased.	Middle name captured more often, resulting in higher rates of discrepancy
Social Security Number	58% have a blank or default value in one or both records, compared to 36.5% in 2007. There is a significant volume of typographical or transposition errors.	Patients still hesitant about sharing SSN, but data capture increased over the years Many systems require SSN, forcing registrars to change a digit in patient's SSN (because the patient's real SSN is already entered in the original patient record)
Date of Birth	DOB capture has increased overall over the years. Birthdate day mismatches and year mismatches are both less frequent than they used to be.	DOB is collected more accurately than it used to be Likely helped by Joint Commission initiatives regarding positive patient identification
Gender	Gender discrepancies have increased over the years.	Possible explanations: sex-change operations, data entry errors, and reference lab specimen registrations (if the lab test is not gender specific, registrar keeps the default entry)

Abbreviations: DOB = date of birth, FN = first name, MN = middle name, LN = last name, SSN = Social Security number.