Tutorial ID | T-16 |
Section | Preparing a Case/Reviewing the case |
Title | Using the Author Registry for Consistent Names |
Subtitle | Keep author names accurate and consistent across every case on your portal. |
Before You Begin
Author - the source that created an episode's records (a treating clinician who signed off on a report, a facility that generated a billing statement, or an attorney who authored a legal document).
Author Registry - is a list of every author entered across your cases — every provider, clinician, facility, court, attorney, or firm credited with creating a record.
Across case records, the same provider can appear a dozen different ways — initials instead of a full name, a misspelling, or a name entered with and without a middle initial or credentials.
The changes to the author registry apply across every case on the portal, not just the one you are working in.
What You Will Accomplish
By the end of this tutorial, author names across your portal will be accurate, consistent, and free of duplicate variants. You will know how to add, verify new authors, merge author duplicates.
Why Does this Tutorial Matter
A clean, single list gives you consistent author names across every case on the portal. Because the registry reaches every case, keeping it clean pays off across all of your work.
What to Do if Something Goes Wrong
The list below covers the most common problems with Author Registry. Each entry follows the same pattern: what you'll notice, why it likely happened, and how to fix it.
Tip Because the registry is shared across every case on the portal, cleaning up from duplicates benefits all of them — and a careless merge can affect them all too. |
Problem: The registry fills with variants of the same author.
Likely cause: Because entries are created from whatever is typed on an episode, the same provider accumulates under several spellings, abbreviations, and forms across the portal's cases.
Example: Dr. A. Martinez appears in the registry as "A. Martinez," "Dr. Ana Martinez," "Martinez, A," and "Dr. Martines" — four separate entries for the same physician. One case entered her name from a referral letter using only her initial. Another pulled it from a signature block with the full first name. A third copied it from a form where her last name was written with her title attached. The fourth came from a scanned record where the OCR engine misread "Martinez" as "Martines." Each entry looked complete and correct on its own, so nothing flagged the four as duplicates — until someone searching for "Dr. Ana Martinez" filtered results that missed three-quarters of her actual records.
Fix:
Click Author Registry.
All authors appear in alphabetical order. Look through the list for possible variants of the same author.
Decide which entry is the correct one, and which variants should be removed.
On each variant you want to remove, choose Mark duplicate.
In the list that opens, select the correct author. All episodes linked to the variant will be re-linked to the author you selected.
Problem: While creating an episode, the author from a record doesn't appear in the list of authors after you type their name or initials.
Likely cause: The author is new to this portal and hasn't been added to the Author Registry before, so there's no existing entry for the system to suggest.
Example: A reviewer is building an episode from a report signed by "Dr. Helen Voss, DPT." Typing "Voss" into the author field returns no matches — this is the first time anyone on the portal has entered a record from this provider. The reviewer adds her manually: first name Helen, last name Voss, credentials DPT. The entry is saved, and "Dr. Elena Voss, DPT" is now available to select on any future episode across the portal, without anyone needing to type her name in from scratch again.
Fix:
Confirm you've tried searching by a few different variations of the name — full name, last name only, and initials — in case the author does exist under a different form.
If no matching entry appears, add the author manually.
Enter the author's first name, last name, and credentials exactly as they appear on the source document.
Once typed, the new author is added to the registry and becomes available across the portal for future episodes.
Problem: An edit or deletion reaches further across the portal than you intended.
Likely cause: Because the registry is shared, a change to an author affects every case on the portal that uses it — not only the case you're currently working in.
Example: A reviewer deletes what looks like a stray duplicate author while cleaning up one case.
That author is actually linked to episodes in six other active cases across the portal, and all six lose their attribution for that provider.
Fix:
Before editing or deleting an author, open Linked episodes to see where it's used.
Confirm the change is appropriate for every affected case.
Take particular care with Delete, since removing an author affects all of its linked episodes across the portal.
Problem: Two genuinely different authors get merged into one.
Likely cause: Marking one author as a duplicate of another is powerful and doing it based on a similar name alone can misattribute records across many cases at once.
Example: Two clinicians named "Dr. Sarah Chen" — one an orthopedic surgeon in Texas, one a psychiatrist in Oregon — get merged into a single registry entry because their names match exactly.
Records from both providers are now attributed to one entry.
Fix:
Before using Mark duplicate of, confirm that the two entries really are the same source.
Where two authors share a similar name — two clinics, or two clinicians with the same surname — keep them distinct.
Check Linked episodes after merging to confirm the attribution is correct.
Problem: The Verified and Organization flags are inconsistent or wrong.
Likely cause: These flags drive the filters, so when they're set inconsistently across similar entries, filtering by them returns a misleading view of the registry.
Example: A physical therapy clinic is entered with the Organization flag off, as though it were an individual provider.
Filtering the registry for organizations to review facility-level authors misses it entirely.
Fix:
Set the Organization flag to reflect whether the author is an organization — a facility, clinic — rather than an individual.
Use the Verified flag consistently — it should always mean the author's name and details have been confirmed and correct.
Use the filters to surface entries whose flags look wrong and correct them.
Summary
Author names across your portal are now accurate, consistent, and free of duplicate variants. Verified entries reflect real review, genuine duplicates are merged under one canonical name, and every edit or merge has been checked against its portal-wide reach before being made.