How to Resolve Duplicate Data Entry Issue?

[adigga1]

I am building a Patient Medical Billing Database and I will be entering duplicate information from time to time, such as, entering a patient that has received a Chest X-ray twice or three time on the same day.

the issue here is that this patient will have to be charged three separate times for each X-ray.

How can I set this up so that when my manager prints a report it doesn't show as if it were a user-error in data entry?

Thank you in advance for your patience in this issue.

Adigga1

[Scott Price]

What is your current table structure?

Please post your tables' MetaData. Here is an example of how to post table MetaData :
Table Name=tblStudent

[i]Field; Type; IndexInfo[/i]
StudentID; AutoNumber; PK
Family; String; FK
Name; String
University; String; FK
Mark; Numeric
LastAttendance; Date/Time

Regards,
Scott

[adigga1]

Will Do, I am off-site at the moment, I will send it ASAP. In the mean time, can I successfully accomplish this task?

[Scott Price]

With a properly designed database, yes! With design flaws, probably, but it will be much much harder.

In short: You need a separate Appointments, or possibly Services table that is linked to your Patients table by foreign key (the primary key of the Patients table entered in the Services table as a separate field). There exists a one-to-many relationship between Patients and Services. This means that your problem really is quite simple when the tables are structured properly.

Regards,
Scott

[adigga1]

Ok I will try to first restructure my table format and try your suggestion and test

I was thinking also to have Access automatically place a marker on duplicated entries to have it reflected on reports? logical?

Regards,
Adigga1

[Scott Price]

Let me put this in a little more suggestive language: Don't even think about doing this without first correcting your table structure :-) If you need help doing so, please don't hesitate to ask, and especially have a good read though Normalisation and Table structures.

Regards,
Scott

[adigga1]

Let me put this in a little more suggestive language: Don't even think about doing this without first correcting your table structure :-) If you need help doing so, please don't hesitate to ask, and especially have a good read though Normalisation and Table structures.

Regards,
Scott

OK I will do so, and thank you very much for your patience during this dialogue

Regards,
Adigga1

[Scott Price]

No problem!

Database design is, unfortunately, the thing most people pay the least attention to when building a database, but is the single most important thing to making the implementation of your needs and ideas easier!

Any questions on table design, please don't hesitate to ask.

Regards,
Scott

[NeoPa]

...
I was thinking also to have Access automatically place a marker on duplicated entries to have it reflected on reports? logical?
...

FYI There are ways to flag such duplicate entries.
When you get to that stage and have the metadata (table layout) info available, we can look at particulars.