Huiping Xu

Matching patients to their medical records from multiple health care providers is critical to medical care, but can be challenging to accomplish because their records can be incomplete or inaccurate, and patients often share similar names. How, for example, to match medical records to the correct “John Jones” or “Maria Garcia” from their primary care doctor's office, the lab which processed tests the doctor ordered, the imaging center where they had a cancer screening, the out of town hospital where they were treated while on vacation? What if a name is recorded as James at one site and as Jim at another? And what if a common or uncommon name is mistyped at one or more places?...