Our organization will begin to receive patient information in the next few months.  We are looking at receiving it weekly (approx 1,500 names each week- we have five hospitals participating!). We have nailed down the parameters of who we will screen out, and are now looking at the security and management of the data.  Our Security department will be performing an audit to make sure we have it as locked down as possible.

 I am wondering how this compares to others who are receiving patient data and how they manage it.  Does your IT department remove the dupes (repeat visits) or does that happen on your end? Where/how are you storing it?  Are you putting it into RE?  If so, at what point?  When a contribution is received, or if they opt out of receiving information from you?  What about existng people in RE which may show up on the patient list?  Is someone cross referencing the list with existing constituents in RE? 

I am in a flux about how to manage this.  We are thinking about purchasing an additional RE database.  That way we can secure the data, track what we send to them (our plan is to send everyone an informational packet), filter out dupes, and easily import into RE.  Is anyone else out there doing it like this or similarly?

Help!! and thanks!

Marianne - there are some references to this topic in the archives, have you searched there?

The hospital depts that provide the patient data to us do all the de-duping for multiple visits. We store it on a shared foundation drive that limited users have access to. We do NOT put them in RE, unless they end up making a gift. We usually get 10K+ names at a time; of which only 1/3 might make a gift. We keep an exclusion file on the shared drive for all who opt-out. We do a merge/purge with the patient list & our RE donors before we solicit to make sure none are already in the database or marked as No Solicit, etc. It's a pretty time-intensive process, but we won't be doing it on-going. It was part of our campaign solicit process.

Thank you for your response.  We are still trying to figure out how we are going to manage this.  If we come up with anything fabulous I will share it with you!