We'd probably have to time travel back to the 70's to chat with the db designers of most hospital EMR systems. Plus all these old MUMPS/CACHE "databases" that make data retrieval real fun! I'm attempting to parse dosage's from SIG/Instruction fields from our medication tables - there are >25,000 different textual ways of telling someone how to take a drug!

My only other recommendation would be to ensure your thresholds/weights are low for first name and higher for the other fields.

B