

Ask HN: Product/Tool suggestion request - DavidWanjiru

A small medical practice has for years (going back to 1988)used written records for their patients. They have a book where they assign a number, add the name and postal address of patient. They then use a card with the assigned number to write the medical stuff (age, symptoms, prognosis, etc). As well, they give the patient a matching (smaller) card for follow up visits.
Patients often misplace their reference cards, and end up being given new files that make no reference to previous files.
To solve this, they had the book records (manually assigned, unique -but with clerical error repetitions and omissions- file numbers; name and P. O. Box addresses) typed into excel, hoping to be able to search in the excel file for multiple repeats by the same patient as well as for when a patient returns without their patient card. There&#x27;s about 60,000 records in total.
The problem is that excel is not very useful when a search for John Someone yields 22 John Someones from a batch of 60K records. I want to give them a tool that, when they search for John Someone, it brings up all the 22 John Someones, but sorts them,say, in order of date (most recent first), and if the addresses are the same, it can flag records that represent the same patient. That sort of thing.
Can you recommend a tool for this? I&#x27;ve no idea how elastic search works, but reading about it makes me think using it for this would be akin to using a space-ship where a hand-glider (maybe?) might be enough.
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landyman
I'm pretty sure Excel can do all of this. I think if all of the data has
already been ported to Excel, it would be much easier to figure out how to
make Excel do what you want than to port the data to something else and
learning something else.

In this example, you could filter the data by name, sort the results by the
date, and highlight all duplicate addresses using conditional formatting.

If you really don't want to use Excel, you could load the csv in almost any
programming language; read in the records, find the duplicates and spit the
resulting records back out into whatever format you want.

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takinola
I probably do not totally understand your requirements but it would appear you
could accomplish everything you want in Excel.

However, if you really don't want to use Excel, and you have some programming
chops, you could export the Excel spreadsheet into a database (say MySQL).
Once the information is in a database, the queries you can run are only
limited by your imagination.

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DavidWanjiru
While typing this "ask", I tried something in excel to illustrate what I
wanted, and realized, "oh wait, excel can actually do this...", but I figured
to ask anyway, coz I don't want to argue with all the pop singers who've said
to live and learn :-)

~~~
brudgers
Thereby forestalling the inevitable increase to the total number of bugs in
the world.

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seekingcharlie
You could just set up a Wordpress website with a custom post type for each
customer & custom fields for the record key/values.

