Zip code Drop down

[vaderkty]

Is there any way to create a link feature and add zip codes to city's drop down menu? we are getting patients that are giving us the wrong zip codes. we have to google search each one in order to fix. Linking certain zip codes to the correct cities would fix this issue (and create a lot of work on the admin end for user but save a lot of headaches later)

[mdeyedoc]

Sept 27, 2014 14:40:48 GMT -6 vaderkty said:

Linking certain zip codes to the correct cities would fix this issue (and create a lot of work on the admin end for user but save a lot of headaches later)

Amen. I've been asking for a City, State autofill based on the zip for 2 years. We did that for 8 years and never had a problem and I've seen zipcodes used to autofill city and state on many online retail sites too. I was told that Crystal had that function at one time but they ran into zipcodes associated with more than one city or some kind of conflicting data.

From this site: www.buyzips.com/preferred.htm , it looks like the post office assigns "preferred" city names when a zipcode is assigned to more than one city and that can be used as the mailing address even though a person may actually live in a different town. I know I have patients that live in the Cary city limits but have Raleigh or Apex mailing addresses. Worse case, it could autofill the preferred city and state and we could overwrite the city if it was different. It may not be as much of a benefit in rural practices that are more likely to run into multiple towns on one zip, but it would save time and prevent typos for everybody else. Maybe have an option to turn off the autofill for rural practices that run into multiple cities with the same zip?

In my program, we started off with a handful of the most common zipcodes in the database. I placed the zipcode field on the form before the address and, if the zip was in the database, the city and ST autofilled and the cursor moved to the next field. If the zipcode wasn't in the database, a new database record was generated from the data that was entered. It would be harder to automatically generate the database if more than one city/zip or overwriting the city was allowed but over 90% of my patients are covered by 10 zipcodes so it doesn't take much effort to get zips set up for the vast majority of patients.

Marcia

[vaderkty]

It's not that difficult for us to change a city name if something different comes up. Fact is, the Postal Service disregards the city information to begin with. It is only really for when something is deliverable. I am also really only dealing with a handful of zipcodes (for the most part). My address comes up as aspen hill in the zipcode search but I am in Silver Spring. I get the mail either way. Aspen Hill is just a sub division of Silver Spring.
I bet any erroneous info using zipcodes was due to a similar issue. I would also wager the mail would arrive either way, just as it does to me.
I originally had just requested to have the dropdown box for zipcodes added back and I would link the handful myself. I would MUCH rather just have the ability to autofill BASED on zipcode.