Name Formatter

How to use it

1. Paste your names into the left box, one per line. Mixed formats are fine.
2. Pick the shape you need at the top. Separate columns gives you tab-separated parts you can paste straight into a spreadsheet.
3. Check the amber panel if it appears. Anything the parser was unsure about is listed there with the reason, rather than quietly guessed at.
4. Press Copy and paste the whole column back.

What it pulls apart

Every line is broken into six pieces before it is rebuilt: title, first name, middle name, last name, generational suffix and credentials. Getting those last two apart is the whole job, and it is where most tools fall over.

• Titles — Dr., Mr., Mrs., Ms., Prof. and the military and clerical ones. Found whether they sit at the front (Dr. Michael Jones) or inside the surname half (Dr. Jones, Michael).
• Generational suffixes — Jr., Sr., II, III, IV. These are part of the legal name and stay with it, attached to the surname in a Last, First layout and to the end in First Last.
• Credentials — MD, DO, RN, NP, PA-C, DDS, PharmD, LCSW and around forty others. These are not part of the legal name, so they are removed by default and kept only if you tick the box.
• Compound surnames — van der Berg, De La Cruz, von Trapp, O'Brien, McDonald. The particles stay attached to the surname instead of being mistaken for middle names.

Why suffixes and credentials must not be confused

This is the distinction that matters most in billing, and it is worth being precise about. Jr. is part of a person's legal name: if the insurance card says John Smith Jr., the claim needs it. MD is not part of anyone's legal name: it is a professional credential, and a patient name field containing "MD" will not match the payer's record.

So the defaults are set for patient names — credentials off, suffixes kept. When you are formatting a provider roster instead, tick Keep credentials and they come back, normalised to upper case.

The formats, and what each is for

• Last, First MI is the shape the CMS-1500 asks for in Box 2: last name, first name, middle initial.
• Separate columns is for electronic claims and spreadsheet imports. The 837 format carries the name in separate elements rather than one string — surname, given name, middle name — so a single formatted line is the wrong shape. This gives you tab-separated parts with a header row, ready to paste into a sheet or a mapping template.
• First Last is for letters, statements and anything a patient reads.
• Last, First is for alphabetical worklists and schedules.

Fixing the casing on an export

Practice management exports very often arrive in ALL CAPS. Setting casing to Fix to Proper Case normalises them, and it knows the conventions that a naive capitalise-each-word would get wrong: MCDONALD becomes McDonald, O'BRIEN becomes O'Brien, MACLEOD becomes MacLeod, and hyphenated names are capitalised on both sides.

Inside a compound surname the particles stay lowercase — Van der Berg, not Van Der Berg. If your payer needs the name to match the card character for character, choose Leave as typed and nothing is touched but the order.

What it tells you it is unsure about

A silently wrong name is worse than an obviously wrong one, because it gets submitted. So rather than guessing confidently at everything, the tool flags the lines it cannot be certain about and shows you the reason:

• Only one name part. "Cher" could be a first or a last name and there is no way to tell.
• Unusually many parts. Five or more words often means two names got joined, or a stray field came along for the ride.
• Nothing before or after the comma. A malformed line, usually from a bad export.

Everything else is converted without comment. The counter above the review panel tells you how many of your rows need a look, so a list of four hundred names with three flags is three lines to check rather than four hundred.

Questions

Is any of this uploaded?

No — and for names attached to medical records that matters more than usual. The parsing is a JavaScript function running in your browser. Nothing you paste leaves the page, there is no server to send it to, and it is not logged anywhere. You can confirm it in the Network tab of your developer tools, or by disconnecting from the internet and watching the tool carry on working. See our Privacy Policy for the full position.

How many names can I do at once?

There is no limit set by us. Several thousand lines convert in well under a second, because the work happens on your own machine rather than in a queue on somebody's server.

It split a name wrongly. What now?

Edit that line in the left box and it re-formats immediately. Names are genuinely ambiguous — there is no rule that separates "Maria De La Cruz Santos" into given and family names without knowing the person — so the tool is built to make a sensible choice, show its work, and get out of your way when it is wrong.

Can I use it for provider names as well as patients?

Yes. Tick Keep credentials and they are preserved and normalised. That is the main difference between the two jobs.

Why is the middle name sometimes dropped?

Only if you ask. Middle name has three settings: keep it in full, shorten it to an initial, or remove it. Box 2 of the CMS-1500 wants an initial, so the Last, First MI format shortens it for you.