de-identifying medical record number in a patient database

[BarthWilsey]

Right now, each patient is identified with their medical record number.
We could go and manually input an 001 next to any record with the
Medical Record# XXXXXXXXX and 002 for any Medical Record# YYYYYYYYY.
But that would take quite a while. Do you know of another method that
would be more efficient, and less prone to human error?

 

[Max]

Perhaps something along these lines ..

Assuming the medical records are in A1 down

Put in B1:
=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("XXXXXXXXX",A1)),"001-"&A1,
IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("YYYYYYYYY",A1)),"002-"&A1,""))

Copy B1 down

Adapt to suit ..

 

[Max]

Alternatively, if we wanted to assign
a "unique" sequential numeric prefix to the records in col A

then we could put instead in B1:
=TEXT(ROW(A1),"000")&"-"&A1
and copy B1 down

Col B will return:
001-XXXXXXXXX
002-XXXXXXXXX
003-YYYYYYYYY
004-XXXXXXXXX
etc

---