anonymous wrote on Tuesday, December 04, 2012:
Is there a way to mark former patients as inactive so that they are no longer included in calculations of quality measures and no longer come up as needing recalls?
bradymiller wrote on Sunday, December 16, 2012:
Hi,
In the CDR engine, there is a place that screens out the deceased patients, which is set in Demographics->Misc. So the non-ideal option would be to set them as deceased. It also shouldn’t be too difficult (requires coding though) to add an activity field(s) in demographics that could be used where the deceased field is processed in the CDR engine to bypass those patients.
-brady
OpenEMR
mdsupport wrote on Monday, March 04, 2013:
Late reply but this is an important issue.
Our workaround for inactive patients (examples : HMO patients who disenroll or one-off patients seen at different facilities) is to use one of the generic* fields in patient_data and assign a custom list for maintaining the information in the demographics. However since this is not system information, we have to maintain the implications manually - so we modified affected rules to consider the field from patient_data table for inclusion.
This is a functional gap in the current design where :
1. Instead of deceased & cause of death pair it would be more general (and serve the same purpose) to record inactive patients and one of the cause of for inactivity could be death.
2. The codebase needs extensive functional review to correctly filter out deceased / inactive patients. Example would be currently the deceased patients are included in the choices for new appointments.