Open Dental Forum

I'm trying to get my head around archived vs. inactive. We have several patients who have disappeared for five years plus and then re-appeared (many have moved out of state and then moved back). If they are archived, of course, to show them, I have to check the box that shows "archived and deceased". I foresee the issue where the returning patient is entered in as a new family and we end up with duplicates. Aside from better training of the front desk, is there a way to alert the user that an "archived/deceased" patient with that name already exists?

If it's been 5 years, then they sort of need to start over from scratch anyway, right? You sort of have to depend on them to tell you that they are an existing patient. Which is exactly why we always need to show the inactive patients in the list so you don't accidentally add a duplicate. Looks like we may be moving towards a patient merge function to solve this problem.

Maybe a message could pop up when you enter a patient name and birthdate that coincides with an existing one. Then the user would have a choice to either "merge" both patients or tell OD to go ahead with the new patient record.
Jorge Bonilla, DMD

Sounds like a good idea. Someone should put it in as a feature request.