Is there any way to merge patient accounts?

[jpisariktnosi]

Occasionally, we accidentally create an account for a patient who already exists in the system (in our most recent example, we misspelled the last name slightly, so she didn't come up as an existing patient, but once the name was corrected, it was found that she now has 2 accounts). Short of manually making sure all the info gets moved, is there any way to merge the two accounts? I think this has been asked before, and I think the answer was "no", but I want to double check.

[Altangie]

This is definitely an enhancement I will look forward to. As a previous Dentrix user. I am missing the Patient Merge feature in this office.  We are utilizing the Zz feature; however it drives the Dr crazy when they are all listed at the bottom of the reports and makes them that much longer. I a million times upvote this.

[jamesmartinez]

Hi Janelle,  

As long as an appointment has not been attached to the chart, you will always have the option to delete.  If you've attached an appointment, at this time we can place the chart to sleep after all data has been transferred by adding "Zz" to the chart demographics and in front of the last name.  (example: ZzSmith.)    This will take the chart to the bottom of the search window and not interfere with the correct chart.  This would be a great enhancement request for future updates!

[omsnashville]

As an enhancement request, YES, this would be tremendously helpful. Especially now that we're chartless, if that receptionist misses the duplicate during conversion, every other person (surgical assistants, insurance dept) are working directly from the schedule, so they won't know they have the wrong patient.

If a patient is fully converted, surgery performed, etc, etc,- it takes me nearly a FULL HOUR to re-post all of that to their existing account- even copying and pasting. The anesthesia record has to be re-entered by hand, in order to be visible where people will LOOK for it (saving a PDF copy and leaving it as an attachment won't do). The same goes for all EMR notes; they need to be where people will LOOK for them, so they all have to be copied and pasted, one by one.

Obviously, we don't want all employees to have access and accidentally merge two charts, but maybe if there was an Admin-level action (limited by Security) to merge two accounts, that would be a beautiful thing.

[paula1 · Accepted solution]

Hi, I want to make sure this reaches our Development team. That would be a useful enhancement to merge two charts. Usually they are not identical charts something on them has more or less info. Maybe the creation of a utility to handle this task via the database would be ideal.  For now you do have to manually input the information from the duplicate account to the one you are going to keep; delete and purge appointments - then you can delete that patient or as we recommend in Support, use that Account # for a new patient. Reviewing what we can do to avoid the duplicates and getting to the root cause would be most favorable. I will tag our PLM for this enhancement for consideration.  Thank you Kristina..matt.ackerman‌

[paula1]

Trainer James also provided a reasonable workaround for this situation. Thanks James!