Trying to do a match case study

**adhamija** · 03-22-2012, 03:53 PM

Hi everyone,

I've got a list of patients who have undergone procedure A, and another list of patients that have undergone procedure B. I also have a lot of their data (age, etc.) in the neighboring columns. I want to match the patients in the first list (A) to the patients in the second list (B), so I can make direct comparison in how effective B was. No one is going to match perfectly, but I want to find the closest match for each.

Do you have any suggestions on an efficient way to do this?

Thanks,
Anish

**Dennis7849** · 03-22-2012, 04:38 PM

What keys do you want to use for matching? i.e. First Name & Last Name? Other?

What outputs are you expecting? Or how would you like to see the results?

**adhamija** · 03-22-2012, 04:58 PM

The keys to match are age, blood pressure, etc.

I'd like the output to be Last name, First name.

**adhamija** · 03-22-2012, 05:06 PM

After evaluating at all the factors (age, blood pressure, etc.), I would like the best overall match in List A for that person in List B.

**Dennis7849** · 03-22-2012, 05:44 PM

So are you looking for exact matches? Or Matches that are close numerically?

**adhamija** · 03-22-2012, 05:45 PM

Matches that are close numerically.

**adhamija** · 03-23-2012, 11:17 AM

Another thing i am considering is doing a vlookup for an approximate of a particular variable. The issue is that i can only fid 1 match. Is there any way to find the next best match of a variable using vlookup?