Summary

Develop an RFC that proposes a system for user-defined skip values. The proposal should address a range of situations, starting from simple "string values to ignore" to more complex "ignore when the context indicates so".

Acceptance Criteria

• A new RFC with a proposal for implementing user-defined skip values

Details / Tasks

Largely speaking, there are two phases in the system in which we can achieve this.

• Data validation, the process in which incoming data is cleansed and normalized.
• Linkage matching, the process in which records are compared to one another.
  It should be strongly considered that the latter is preferable from a flexibility perspective. As it gives our users options to adjust the values over time.

Common skip values to consider.

Background / Context

Healthcare organizations often use placeholder values in documents to indicate missing information, such as the name “John Doe” or an address of “unknown.” When these values appear in incoming data, they should be excluded from comparisons. In other words, two patients should not be considered a match solely because both are named “John Doe.” Additionally, we want this functionality to be customizable, allowing organizations to extend or modify the default values provided by Record Linker to fit their specific needs.