this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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I'm certain that fewer than 0.1% of patients at a small medical clinic would share the same first and last names. In those cases, you could differentiate by address and age if necessary.
This falls into a "if it aint broke, dont fix it" kind of thing. Month and Year Birthdate are fairly low privacy info that everyone remembers and are used to giving out" it gets used for so many different checks because we all have the understanding that we give this info out to businesses that need them, switching to other things that in a vacuum would be a better fit in that one specific category in only a tiny amount just isnt worth the confusion and pushback that changing it would cause.
It is broken though.
You only feel like DoB is low level personal information because you tell it to everyone. According to Australian Provacy Principles it's "sensitive" which means it should only be collected when required.
At my podiatrists office it's simply not required.
And EVERYONE has told it to everyone for generations now, which MAKES it low level. This is not a battle worth fighting as it was lost before your grandparents were born and there are numerous other ways we could make society better that would have a lot more impact than your dentist no longer asking what year you were born
Just because a thing has been done in the past does not mean it should be done in the future.
It's also not a "battle". It's not like stopping use of plastic or whatever. Clinics cpuld just stop collecting DoB and use some other attribute.
Or they could just continue doing what works for them and change nothing because almost no one cares because its not worth caring about. When you were born reveals literally nothing else about you
I think you underestimate how common the most common first and last names are. In an even small city you are likely to see repeats of the most common names.
Does that really matter?
Differentiate some other way.
Yes, uniquely identifying the patient is important, especially for pharmacies where people with the same name might receive different doses of the same drug or receive similar sounding drugs that the patient might not catch.
What would you suggest? It needs to be a piece of information that is probably unique when paired with name at least as far as the local area, that absolutely everyone has, that the pharmacy and doctor both have and is unlikely to change (to avoid issues where records in one place are updated before the other).