Not-patient indicator settings

The standard configuration for OpenREM is to not store any patient identifiable information. Therefore it can be difficult to distinguish between real patients and test or quality assurance exposures.

Changed in 0.8.0

To aid identification of non-patient exposures, the patient name and the patient ID are checked against a set of patterns, and if a match is found then the pattern is recorded in the database before the patient name and ID are deleted or converted to a hash (see Patient identifiable data for details).

Setting the patterns to identify non-patient studies

Config menu

The Config menu

Use the Config menu and select Not-patient indicators:

The patient name and the ID are matched against the patterns you configure. The patterns make use of wildcards as per the following table, and are case insensitive:

Pattern Meaning
* matches everything
? matches any single character
[seq] matches any character in seq
[!seq] matches any character not in seq

To match all studies where the patient name begins with physics, the pattern should be set to physics*. This would match Physics^RoutIQ but not match Testing^Physics. The patient name in DICOM is normally formatted Family name^Given name^Middle name^Prefix^Suffix. Therefore to match any studies where the first name is Test, you would set the pattern to be *^test*.

If your test patient name always starts with PHY and then a number, you might use this pattern: phy[0-9]*. Here we have used a range for the sequence to match any number, but it will only match one character per sequence, so a * is required to match all the characters after the first number. This pattern will match Phy12345 and PHY6test but not Phyliss.

The pattern list for patient name and the list for patient ID are separate, so both need to be populated to meet your requirements.

Creating new patterns

Click on Add ID patterns or Add name patterns in the panel title bar and follow the instructions.

Modifying patterns

Click the Modify link in the row of the pattern you wish to modify.

Deleting patterns

Click the Delete link in the row of the pattern you wish to delete. You will be asked to confirm the deletion.

Replicating behaviour of release 0.7.4 and earlier

OpenREM releases before 0.8 had the not-patient identification patterns hard-coded. From release 0.8.0 the patterns are (admin) user configurable, but will start with no patterns in place. To add the patterns that would maintain the behaviour of previous releases, use the link at the bottom of the config page, or the link in the add/modify pages.