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Reference

Algorithm Configuration

The Algorithm configurations are stored in the database and can be managed via the API. Many of the attributes defined on a configuration are limited to a specific set of values, which are defined here.

Features

The Feature enum defines the types of attributes that can be used for matching during the linkage evaluation phase. The following features are supported:

BIRTHDATE

The patient's birthdate (normalized to YYYY-MM-DD).

SEX

The patient's sex (normalized to M or F).

RACE

The patient's race in the format of "AMERICAN_INDIAN", "ASIAN", "BLACK", "HAWAIIAN", "WHITE", "OTHER", "ASKED_UNKNOWN" or "UNKNOWN".

GIVEN_NAME

The patient's given name, this includes first and middle names.

FIRST_NAME

The patient's first name.

LAST_NAME

The patient's last name.

SUFFIX

The patient's name suffix.

ADDRESS

The patient's address.

CITY

The patient's city.

STATE

The patient's state.

ZIP

The patient's 5 digit zip code.

COUNTY

The patient's county.

TELECOM

The patient's phone, email, fax, or other contact information.

PHONE

The patient's phone number (normalized to 10 digits).

EMAIL

The patient's email address.

IDENTIFIER

An identifier for the patient. Matching on this will check if any identifier type/authority/value combination matches.

IDENTIFIER:<type>

The patient's specific identifier type. For example, IDENTIFIER:MR would be the patient's medical record number. Unlike IDENTIFIER, this will ONLY compare values of a specific type. Valid type codes can be found here http://hl7.org/fhir/R4/v2/0203/index.html.

Blocking Key Types

The BlockingKey enum defines the types of blocking values that are generated from the patient data and used during query retrieval. The following blocking key types are supported:

BIRTHDATE (ID: 1)

The patients birthdate in the format YYYY-MM-DD.

SEX (ID: 3)

The patient's sex in the format of M or F.

ZIP (ID: 4)

The patient's 5 digit zip code.

FIRST_NAME (ID: 5)

The first 4 characters of the patient's first name.

LAST_NAME (ID: 6)

The first 4 characters of the patient's last name.

ADDRESS (ID: 7)

The first 4 characters of the patient's address.

PHONE (ID: 8)

The last 4 digits of the patient's phone number.

EMAIL (ID: 9)

The first 4 characters of the patient's email address.

IDENTIFIER (ID: 10)

The identifier triplet containing only the type, authority, and last 4 digits of the value

Evaluation Functions

These are the functions that can be used to evaluate the matching results as a collection, thus determining it the incoming payload is a match or not to an existing Patient record.

func:recordlinker.linking.matchers.rule_match

Determines whether a given set of feature comparisons represent a 'perfect' match (i.e. all features that were compared match in whatever criteria was specified).

func:recordlinker.linking.matchers.rule_probabilistic_match

Determines whether a given set of feature comparisons matches enough to be the result of a true patient link instead of just random chance. This is represented using previously computed log-odds ratios. A true_match_threshold needs to be set in the kwargs parameter to determine the minimum log-odds ratio that is considered a match. Example: {"kwargs": {"true_match_threshold": 12.5}}

Feature Matching Functions

These are the functions that can be used to compare the values of two features to determine if they are a match or not.

Note: When most features are compared, we are doing a 1 to 1 comparison (e.g. "M" == "M"). However, some features have the ability to have multiple values (e.g. GIVEN_NAME), thus feature matching is designed to compare one list of values to another list of values. For example, an incoming record could have a GIVEN_NAME of ["John", "Dean"] and we could be comparing them to an existing Patient with the GIVEN_NAME of ["John", "D"].

func:recordlinker.linking.matchers.compare_match_any

Determines if any of the features are a direct match.

func:recordlinker.linking.matchers.compare_match_all

Determines if all of the features are a direct match.

func:recordlinker.linking.matchers.compare_fuzzy_match

Determines if the features are a fuzzy match based on a string comparison. JaroWinkler, Levenshtein and Damerau-Levenshtein are supported, with JaroWinkler as the default. Use the kwargs parameter to specify the desired algorithm and thresholds. Example: {"kwargs": {"similarity_measure": "levenshtein", "thresholds": {"FIRST_NAME": 0.8}}}

func:recordlinker.linking.matchers.compare_probabilistic_fuzzy_match

Similar to the above function, but uses a log-odds ratio to determine if the features are a match probabilistically. This is useful when wanting to more robustly compare features by incorporating their predictive power (i.e., the log-odds ratio for a feature represents how powerful of a predictor that feature is in determining whether two patient records are a true match, as opposed to a match by random chance). Use the kwargs parameter to specify the fuzzy match threshold and log-odds ratio based on training. Example: {"kwargs": {"thresholds": {"FIRST_NAME": 0.8}, "log_odds": {"FIRST_NAME": 6.8}}}