Validating Name Characters

Jul 4, 2012

Well, the pcEHR go-live hasn’t gone that well. One particular feature that’s attracted some attention is that fact that the pcEHR won’t accept people with some unusual characters in their surnames. From http://www.medicalobserver.com.au/news/punctuation-a-stumbling-block-for-ehealth:

Medical Observer has found patients with apostrophes or hyphens in their name cannot register for an e-health record, as the government scrambles to get the rest of the patient registration process working.

It sounds like a glaring oversight… only, just what characters do you need to allow in a patient’s surname? I suspect that real experts would be fairly circumspect in commenting on this - it’s harder than it looks.

Firstly, in general, this is a good assessment of requirements: http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names. But this is for the entire world. Do you have to support all these in an Australian context? What’s the point of supporting name characters that Medicare don’t support, for instance? (there’s some, but is it worth it). Since most systems we have were designed pre-unicode, the answer can never be as simple as, any unicode character.

Perhaps there’s an applicable Australian standard? How about AS 5017, “Health Care Client Identification”? Now what is has to say about this is:

Family Name Verification rules:  Alphabetic characters, tilde (~), punctuation (.,-) and spaces only(2006 version)

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that AS 5017 is the standard which has been followed in the design of the HI service and the pcEHR, and you’ll note that apostrophes aren’t on the list (though hyphens are, so I’m guessing that hyphens are actually ok, but the spokesmen was confused on the fine details - pretty likely in my experience).  Now it sounds like a glaring oversight not to accept apostrophe’s, but all you need is one developer to faithfully follow the rules - that is what you want, after all - and the tester’s to miss this minor point, and bingo - you have a public relations disaster…. (I must say, I have no idea why tilde’s are on the list -

btw, for given name, AS 5017 doesn’t specify any verification rules. There’s some good advice in Meteor for family name and given name, but again, no comprehensive list of characters there either. While writing this blog, I spent some time perusing the medicare web site for the rules around name character verification - they obviously do have them, since there’s error codes relating to invalid characters in names, but I couldn’t find what they are.

At an HL7 meeting, I heard about a US family that named their son φ, and expected systems to cater for this, but I’m pretty sure that you wouldn’t need to cater for this in Australia.

If anyone has more information, it’d be great to have them in the comments. Thanks