That said, while it may have been a reasonable point of ID in the 90s, I don’t believe that remains the case in 2024.
It’s useful for quickly disambiguating between multiple people with the same name though - the odds that two people with the same name and date of birth are using the same provider on the same day are low enough to consider it useful.
I’m certain that fewer than 0.1% of patients at a small medical clinic would share the same first and last names. In those cases, you could differentiate by address and age if necessary.
This falls into a “if it aint broke, dont fix it” kind of thing. Month and Year Birthdate are fairly low privacy info that everyone remembers and are used to giving out" it gets used for so many different checks because we all have the understanding that we give this info out to businesses that need them, switching to other things that in a vacuum would be a better fit in that one specific category in only a tiny amount just isnt worth the confusion and pushback that changing it would cause.
I think you underestimate how common the most common first and last names are. In an even small city you are likely to see repeats of the most common names.
It’s useful for quickly disambiguating between multiple people with the same name though - the odds that two people with the same name and date of birth are using the same provider on the same day are low enough to consider it useful.
I’m certain that fewer than 0.1% of patients at a small medical clinic would share the same first and last names. In those cases, you could differentiate by address and age if necessary.
This falls into a “if it aint broke, dont fix it” kind of thing. Month and Year Birthdate are fairly low privacy info that everyone remembers and are used to giving out" it gets used for so many different checks because we all have the understanding that we give this info out to businesses that need them, switching to other things that in a vacuum would be a better fit in that one specific category in only a tiny amount just isnt worth the confusion and pushback that changing it would cause.
I think you underestimate how common the most common first and last names are. In an even small city you are likely to see repeats of the most common names.
Does that really matter?
Differentiate some other way.