Before you begin developing your master index application, make sure you have obtained the following information:
The primary object to be indexed, such as a person, customer, business, and so on (in the case of Master Index, this is likely to be a Patient or Person object)
Any secondary objects, such as telephone numbers and addresses
All fields to be stored in the index for both the primary and secondary objects
The name of each field as it appears on the Patient EDM and whether the field will be a standard text field or will be populated from a menu list (if a field will be populated from a menu list, you should also define an eight-character name for the list)
The fields that are required in order to add a record or that are required for queries
The fields that will appear on reports
The fields that must be unique to an enterprise record (in other words, they uniquely identify a child object within an enterprise record)
The fields that will be used for matching
The fields that will need to be parsed or normalized prior to matching
Any special formatting requirements, such as character types, the data type, minimum and maximum values, and field size
The fields that will appear on Patient EDM search and search results windows
The processing codes for the source systems being integrated into the index