Learn how Instinct generates new Account and Patient IDs, making Patient Registration simple and intuitive!
ID Convention
The first thing is that it’s easy to know if you have a Patient vs. Account ID. Patient IDs always begin with a letter and Account IDs always start with a number.
Patient IDs always begin with a two letter abbreviation of the Patient’s Breed and then the two digit year of initial registration. Account IDs always begin with the two digit year of initial registration.
The rest of the ID (for both Patient and Account) use a sequential number system using hexadecimals.
Unlike the common way of representing numbers with ten symbols, this uses sixteen distinct symbols, “0”–”9″ to represent values zero to nine, and “A”–”F” to represent values ten to fifteen as shown above. This helps keep IDs shorter over time as your client and patient list grows.
Account ID
Using the ID convention listed above, an Account ID of 20DBBA1 would represent an account initially registered in 2020 and your hospital’s 900,001st account.
- 20 = last two digits of the current year (2020)
- DBBA1 = sequential number (900001) using hexadecimals
💡 Protip: check out this hexadecimal to decimal converter here!
Patient ID
The Patient ID uses the same convention as the Account ID but a prefix of the species short code is added. For example, a Patient ID of CA2030D41 would represent a patient initially registered in 2020 and your hospital’s 200,001st patient.
- The ‘CA’ at the beginning of this code represents ‘Canine”
- 20 = the last two digits of the current year (2020)
- 30D41 = sequential number (200001) using hexadecimals