When entering a new patient, the status will default to Active and should remain active as long as the patient is under your care. If a patient permanently leaves your practice, or just has not been seen in the office for a significant period of time, then the status should be changed to Inactive. This is important for the calculation of Medicare’s Meaningful Use statistics. The calculation of those statistics is based on all patients with a status of Active, whether they have had a recent visit or not. If patients that have not been in the office during the Medicare Attestation date range are in the calculation for Automated Measure Calculation and Clinical Quality Measures, it will be difficult to meet Medicare’s standards for Meaningful Use.
Clicking on the Status drop down arrow displays a list of all the Status items in ChiroSuiteEHR. You can select any item that makes sense for the practice. One Status item is Delete. Note that this is ONLY a categorization. Due to the sensitivity of health care records, deleting a patient account is not allowed in ChiroSuiteEHR. In the event that a patient is no longer under your care, and you do not expect that patient to return to your office, you should set the status to Inactive, Deceased, or some other appropriate category in the patient’s Personal tab window.
Consider the example of opening an account at a bank. You might get an account number, open an account, but decide that you want to immediately close the account. The bank would close the account for you, but would not allocate this account number to another customer. That account was used by you, and the bank will always keep a record of your usage of that account.
Under the laws of many states, you are required to keep patient records indefinitely. This system complies with those laws.