I had an episode where the front office person could not find the patient’s record and assumed since she was new to me that nobody else in our system had seen her. Her last name was hyphenated, but the secretary typed it without the hyphen.
Naturally, this caused an extra “person” to be created. Mary Smith-Jones and Mary Smith Jones have the same date of birth, same phone number, same address, but different medical histories etc. I know there’s a way to merge them (I’ve already asked our “help desk” to fix it) but it should be harder to make this error. Perhaps the search system should be smarter?