Just curious, have any implementers in our community ever run into the requirement of marking a patient as “Inactive”?
This is not the same as Deleting or Marking Deceased.
I came across this as a requirement from one MoH RFP today. I see in the OpenEHR community they recommended handling this by creating a tag similar in UI to Deceased.
I think this would be a great idea
My reasons are below:
If a patient requests to be removed from the active patient list or decides to discontinue treatment with a specific provider or facility, they may be marked as inactive.
When a patient transfers their care to another provider or healthcare facility, they may be marked as inactive in the previous system to indicate that they are no longer under their care.
If a patient has not had any interactions or appointments with a healthcare provider for an extended period, they may be marked as inactive to streamline active patient lists and focus on patients requiring immediate attention.
In some cases, patients may be temporarily marked as inactive if they are away for an extended period due to travel, military deployment, or other reasons but are expected to return to active care in the future.
There could be other administrative reasons within a specific healthcare system or practice that warrant marking a patient as inactive, such as duplicate records, account management, or data archiving processes.
I believe the future can help mitigate such issues without deleting patient data.