Tolerating spelling errors during patient validation

Misspellings, typographical errors, and variant name forms present a considerable problem for a Clinical Information System when validating patient data. Algorithms to correct these types of errors are being used, but they are based either on a study of frequent types of errors associated with general words in an English text rather than types of errors associated with the spelling of names, or on errors that are phonologically based. This paper investigates the types of errors that are specifically associated with the spelling of patient names, and proposes an algorithm that effectively handles such types of errors. This paper also studies the effectiveness of several relaxation techniques and compares them with the one that is being proposed.