de-identifying medical record number in a patient database

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?

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
Singapore
http://savefile.com/projects/236895
xdemechanik
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<[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> 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?
>

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
--
Max
Singapore
http://savefile.com/projects/236895
xdemechanik
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