As time goes by, patients will move out of town, and others will simply pass away. When you’re certain that these patients will not be returning to your practice, you should archive them so they’ll no longer be counted in your active patient base nor show up on lists and reports.
Watch this video to learn how to archive or delete patients. (Duration 2:12)
Additional Tips
- You should archive patients who will not be returning to your practice.
- The patient’s insurance information will be cleared as part of the archival process. If the patient is an insurance subscriber for dependent family members, the plan will also be cleared from those dependents.
- Note the following regarding deleting patient records:
- You can delete a patient from Dentrix only if you’ve never charted any treatment or added any transactions to the patient’s Ledger.
- You should only delete a patient record if it were created by mistake, such as a duplicate record when one already exists; otherwise, you should archive the record. To learn more about deleting patient records, read Deleting Patient Records and Deleting Family Records in Dentrix Help.
- Dentrix deletes all information associated with the patient (including alerts, notes, claims, prescriptions, future appointments, etc.). Some of this information will be written to the patient’s note; however, you can only fully recover this information by restoring a backup of the database that includes the patient’s information.
- You cannot archive patients who meet any of the following criteria:
- Patients with Future Due Payment Plans or outstanding insurance claims: The patient’s payment plan must be paid off, and all outstanding insurance claims must be deleted or received before you can archive the patient.
- Guarantors that have a payment agreement or an outstanding balance: A guarantor must have a zero balance to be archived.
- Guarantors with other family members: You must either change the head of household to a different member of the family or archive all the other family members before you can archive the guarantor. You can archive a guarantor if he or she is the only member of their family.
- When you archive a patient, the following occurs:
- A note appears in the Office Journal for any appointments that the archived patient had with the date, time, provider, and reason the appointment was deleted from the Appointment Book.
- All continuing care, employer, insurance, and referral information is deleted and added to the Patient Note. You can view this information after you archive the patient.
- All address, procedures, insurance claims, payments, adjustments, health history, prescriptions, patient questionnaires, and periodontal exams remain intact.
- You cannot edit a patient’s information as long as the patient is archived.
- Archived patients do not appear in the Select Patient dialog box unless you select Include Archived Patients.
- When archived patients appear on a report or in a module, <Archived> or <A> appears in front of their names.
- To learn more about archiving patients, read Archiving Patients and Archiving Patients with Provider Balances in Dentrix Help.
Check Your Knowledge
If you have access to Dentrix, check your knowledge with this exercise.
- Switch to the Dentrix demo database.
(Skip this step if you are using the Dentrix Learning Edition software.) - Open the Family File and select Paul Olsen.
- Archive his patient record.