NDI Guidance on Free Duplicate Records and Free Reruns

FREE DUPLICATE RECORDS:  NDI clients may submit up to five (5) free duplicate records for a particular study subject if they have conflicting information on that study subject.  Duplicate records in excess of five may be requested for consideration, however payment at the regular rate for excess duplicates may be required.  An example of a free duplicate record situation; if the study subject has files from several hospital divisions – e.g. pharmacy, radiology, laboratory, etc. – only one record will incur a charge, and the other three will be free of charge.  However, NDI clients will need to demonstrate that they have made a concerted effort to remove as many duplicate records as they could identify.  Another example; if a study subject has three surnames, two duplicate records may be created utilizing only one of those three surnames while holding all the other variables constant. Purposes not permitted include attempting to gather missing information (for the study subjects) from NDI files.  For example, missing information on ‘race’ may not be obtained from the NDI by creating many duplicate records to ascertain which one of those will score a ‘true match’ from NDI files, thereby providing the client with information they did not have.  The NDI is obligated to only give out information on date of death, state of death, death certificate number, and cause(s) of death. Furthermore, additional demographic information obtained by creating numerous duplicates runs the risk of an erroneous assumption that such information is the ‘true’ information for that subject. Please call the NDI staff (301-458-4444) if you need clarification for your unique situation.

FREE RERUNS:  Some NDI clients have situations where an error occurs in constructing their data files for submission to the NDI, or additional information was obtained on their subjects that was lacking at the time of the original submission.  Current policy is to allow up to three (3) free reruns of the original file that was submitted to the NDI, which should include all your corrections/additions/deletions, but no additional subjects. Requests in excess of three free reruns will be charged at the regular rate.  Please note that if a client has large files greater than one million records, such requests will be subject to approval on a case by case basis.  If approved, those requests will receive their NDI results on an encrypted CD only, which will require an additional $100 service charge for each shipment.  No NDI results (of such large file searches) will be uploaded to an sFTP site due to mandatory expiration times.