the tool in question is a clinical study tool whereby nursing staff will be entering patient data. the idea is that it's crucial to enter the correct patient identifier and in order to do this the spec requests it to be entered twice. Yes, sure, they could get around it if they tried but the idea is to 'encourage' the user to enter it by hand twice.
Maybe i'll just allow them to cut n paste. At least they would be scanning the entry as they c n p and spot any mistake