Combine Duplicate People

What Is Combining People and Why Do It

Occasionally, you may have repeated instances of the same person in your database. By combining these repetitions, WRMD will work more efficiently for you because it will make WRMD’s cross-referencing more accurate. 

Imagine a scenario where a community member comes to your organization with an injured animal and you, your staff, or your volunteer fills out the new patient information form and includes the contact information for that rescuer. Sometime later, that same person brings in another injured animal into your center, but whoever fills out the intake form assumes they are a new rescuer and fills out the new rescuer field again. Now you have the same person in your database twice. 

To avoid this, you should ask if the person has brought in an animal before. If they have, just do a search for past rescuers. Ideally, you would have one person of that name and address in your people database. 

If more the search pulls up several options of the same person (like in this example), then you need to combine people, so you only have one person with the same contact information.

Combining People

Step 1

Visit https://www.wrmd.org/signin and log into your account using the username and password that you registered with. 

Step 2

Go to the People section of the Quick Links tab on the menu’s left side.

Step 3

Click the Combine People tab.

Step 4

Before you use this tool, it is very important to read the notes and take great care in your next actions as any changes you make cannot be undone.

Step 5

First, choose which fields you want to use to search for potential duplicate people. For example, selecting First Name and Last Name will search for all people with the same first name and same last name. By choosing multiple fields, you will decrease the likelihood of finding false positives.

Step 6

Click the green Search for Duplicate People button.

Step 7

WRMD will list out any possible repetitions and how many matches it has found. To review the people, click on the blue Review These People button.

Step 8

Read the descriptions on the panel carefully.

In order to combine the multiple people into one person, WRMD wants you to tell it which contact information is correct. WRMD pre-guesses some of the information and has highlighted (in green) those fields it believes are correct. WRMD will use the green fields to create the person. The blue indicates fields that still need to be specified because WRMD is not sure what is correct. Pink indicates fields that are not selected and WRMD will simply ignore this value.

Step 9

Click on the correct contact information for that person. Remember to choose their affiliation as well.

Step 10

Once you have carefully reviewed these selections, click Merge These People. Now you have combined the multiple people into one person. Any patients or donations that belong to instances of that person will be re-assigned to the new person, so you haven’t lost any data.