Patient records
What lives on a patient card, the split between administrative and clinical, and how to find anyone fast.
A patient card holds their identity and contact details, their appointment history, their financial balance, and their clinical record. The first three are administrative; the last is not, and the permission model treats them differently on purpose.
Why the split
Someone at the front desk needs to find a patient, check when they are next in, and take a payment. They do not need to read the examination notes to do any of it. Clinical records are their own permission module so that access can be narrowed to the people who actually need them.
You are the controller of this data and we are the processor — we hold it for you and act on your instructions. If a patient asks you to correct or delete their record, you can do it yourself, immediately, without opening a ticket with us.
Creating one
Three ways, and only one of them involves typing:
- The assistant creates one when a new patient books through the widget.
- The front desk creates one directly.
- Converting a waitlist entry brings the details with it.
Email addresses earn their keep
A patient without an email gets no reminders, no self-service links, and no recall nudge — their recall sits in a worklist waiting for someone to phone.
If your no-show rate is stubborn, count how many of your patients have no email address before you change anything else. Often that is the whole story.
Duplicates
They happen — a patient books online as "Mehmet" and the front desk already has "Mehmet Y.". Search by phone number rather than by name before creating a record; the phone is the field patients get right.
Archiving
Archive rather than delete for patients who have simply stopped coming. Archived patients drop out of the working lists and out of the "active patients" metric while their history stays intact. Deletion is for records created in error, or for a patient who has asked.
Common questions
- Can a patient see their own record?
- Not as a login. They can act on individual appointments through self-service links; everything else goes through you, which is what keeps a medical record from being edited by an unverified stranger.
- How do I find a patient with a common name?
- Search by phone or email. Both are unique in practice; names are not.