I noticed today, don’t know why I didn’t months ago, that when you delete an appointment from the calendar it’s just gone. Totally and completely. There’s no confirmation. No record the event ever existed. Not even a record in the System’s Log!
Yikes!
It seems to me this is a pretty bad thing. Of course it’s a good thing because it eliminates extraneous records from the database and speeds up big searches. But I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to make the record totally disappear.
As a developer for the project I’ve made a quick patch and now there’s at least a confirmation about deleting the event. More work should be done so there’s an audit record of the event being deleted. Or better yet, never delete the record at all and instead just mark it as ‘deleted’ so it never appears on the front end interface.
In the CVS repository I have commited a change to the program. This change introduces a new ‘status’ for events called ‘Cancelled’ and has a symbol of ‘x’. With this little feature added to the system events can now be marked as cancelled without being deleted from the system entirely. They still appear on the calendar but that could be changed if users request it.
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From the clinical / billing perspective the reason for cancellation should recorded. Some patients repeatedly cancel or reschedule and this needs to be tracked.