Duplicates: How Do You Deal with Them?

Hi ​@Peter Cameron ! This is a great and timely topic—I would say duplicates is one of the common challenges in managing data in case management. Interested to hear what others are doing too!!

So here’s what we’re seeing work best, and I’d love to hear what’s working (or not!) for the teams here too.

Honestly, the first move is preventing duplicates before they happen. You can mark key fields like Name and Date of Birth as duplicate checks—so when staff are creating a record, Apricot gives them a heads-up if something matches. It’s a simple way to catch things upfront.

Then, if duplicates do slip through, there’s the Document Folder Merge Tool. It combines duplicate Tier 1 and Tier 2 records into one. Just heads up—it’s permanent, so you’ll want to print or export records before you merge anything.

From what we’re hearing, here are some helpful practices: 

• Duplicate checks + a quick search before creating records stops most duplicates before they happen.
• Decide upfront which record you’re keeping (usually the oldest or most complete).
• Have a data steward or admin review matches before anything gets deleted, especially if the records have different info.
• Save printouts or exports before merging. You can review what was deleted with Record Audit if needed.
• Schedule periodic dupe reviews. It’s way easier than one massive cleanup later.

You can check out this article if you are looking for a more detailed step by step.

Tagging our product manager ​@Sarah Sweet, would love to hear your thoughts on duplicate management!

Hi Peter,

We have a few systems for dealing with this.

Training: Every time we do an Apricot training with staff, even if they’ve been trained on this before, we review the duplicate check alert and what to select. We also review best practices for searching (typing a few letters instead of the full name, using % before typing the last name, ading DOB as a search field, etc.). Even with that staff still find the duplicate alert confusing and regularly click the wrong thing. Or enter the name slightly differently and don’t trigger it at all. We have duplicate check and search best practice guides available on our agency’s sharepoint site in case someone forgets how to handle the pop-up but I’m not sure how often those get used.

Staff Identification: If a staff member notices a duplicate during their workday, they can send us a message with the names or record IDs of the duplicates. We’ll review the files and merge them. We have a number of staff members who do this consistently but they’re typically staff who have been around for longer or are supervisors.

Auditing: To catch some of these, we just started doing a once-yearly audit. We have a native report that pulls the first name, last name, and date of birth into a single column. It includes all clients in the system. Once/yr we run the report, export it to excel, and use the conditional formatting “duplicates” feature in Excel to highlight potential duplicates. The rest is a pretty tedious process of opening each potential set of duplicate records, reviewing the other info in the client record to confirm it’s a duplicate as much as possible, and then merging the records.

We do a second round of reviewing w/ the report where we just look at first name and date of birth. This catches folks who weren’t picked up by using the full name because someone entered the last name “Jackson Smith” and someone else entered “Jackson-Smith”.

We’re hoping this process will get quicker each year and produce fewer and fewer duplicates but we’ve only done it twice so far.