How do I Delete (Inactivate) a Patient?

Because patients cannot be deleted in the EMR, we’ve included two status drop-downs, Discharged and Inactive, to exclude unwanted profiles from appearing in your list of active patients. Patients that have been inactivated or discharged will not lose their documentation. Let’s review when to use each.

When to Discharge a Patient

Discharging a patient removes them from your active patient list but keeps the patient data in the system. This is the recommended best practice for most patient records.

Here are a few examples of why you would discharge a patient:

1. The patient was referred, but he or she never came to therapy.
2. You want to remove the patient from an active patient list.
3. The patient is no longer attending therapy.

When to Inactivate a Patient

When you inactivate a patient, it removes them from the active patient list and also removes all insight into the patient’s related data in Analytics—including case, referral, visit, note, prescription/authorization, and billing data. This will impact every chart, comparison, and report in Analytics.

There are three reasons to inactivate a patient:

1. The patient is a duplicate, typically created through Patient Intake or Quick Add.
2. You created the patient in error without any patient data tied to it.
3. The patient record was a test patient you created while learning the application.

These are the only instances where inactivating a patient is a better course of action than discharging the patient. In all other instances, a patient should be discharged.

If you are integrated with WebPT Billing, you will have a limited ability to inactivate patients. Click here to learn more about inactivating patients with a WebPT Billing integration.

How to Discharge/Inactivate a Patient

1. Click Display Patients from the Patient Manager tab.

   

2.  Fill in any patient information in the Patient Search, then click Search or Search All to filter the existing list of patients and locate the patient record you want to make inactive.

3. Click on the patient's name to open the patient's chart. You may be asked to select/confirm the case if there is more than one patient case for the patient.
4. Click Patient Info for the case.

   

5. Click Edit in the top right corner of the patient's chart.
6.  From the Status drop-down in the Patient Info section, select Inactive to inactivate the patient or select Discharge to discharge the patient.
7. Then click the Save Patient button at the bottom of the page, to complete the inactivation of the record and save your changes.
8. Use the Patient Search to locate an inactive or discharged patient record, simply set your search filter to inactive or discharged and key in the search info.
9. You can easily reactivate profiles at any time by using these steps and changing the status back to Active.