Open Dental Forum

Is there a way to delete and purge old charts and data? In some situations, there is no reason to keep data for old charts for patients who have not been seen in many years. I really need to do some pruning of the data. It makes no sense to keep so much information for patients as it becomes a liability in the event of a data breach. I would not want to have to contact 20k-30k patients if this ever happens. It's too cumbersome to do it manually.

Does Open Dental have a tool to set a parameters to run a query to run a list with the following criteria:

Family files with all patients over 21 years old AND have not been seen in the last 10 years.

These are the charts I would want to purge.

Does nobody else care that we carry an unnecessary liability of maintaining all of the old chart data? Everybody is comfortable keeping 20 yr old charts in their database? I know the risk is low but does that mean that we should not takes steps to mitigate that risk?

Is there something that I am missing here?

If deleted, this will mess up all the reports, accounting, etc......procedures completed by your provider, etc ....

You can archive the patients. This only secures against a person manually pulling charts, but wouldn't affect reporting.

You could also scramble identifying information (name, DOB, phone, address (maybe leave the ZIP?), SSN, etc) and leave everything else. This is probably the way to do what you want--if there's no identifying information, there's no HIPAA liability.

The query for your criteria is pretty straightforward.
https://opendental.com/manual/queryrequest.html

Maybe a feature request can help.

Create Security access in OD security menu.
Security access to archived patients that have not been seen for "X" years.

Each user can specify how many years in the security menu options.

Like this, you can restrict access to this data

Open Dental team maybe can help