Family member deletion problem

[savvy]

I have a problem that I can't seem to solve......sorry, it's a long story........

Once there was a family consisting of Husband (guarantor), Wife (insured), two kids.
Family has multiple year history with dental office.
Dental office is informed that husband and wife divorce.
Wife wants separate account.
Husband and kids are still covered by, now, ex-wife.
Now, ex-wife, is listed on husbands account due to insurance only, as well as her own account.
There are now 2 Doris Snodgrass listed in patient listing.
All players continue with dental treatment over time and said treatment is billed to the insurance.
At one point, insurance becomes very slow to reply.
There becomes outstanding claims for husband, wife and 2 kids since Dec 2007.
However, each account paid what they were told to be the appropriate co-pay as if insurance was still in effect (as we were not informed otherwise).
The office is finally informed by the ex-wife that she changed jobs and no longer has dental insurance as of 10/31/07. (which in turn meant that no one else had insurance either).
It appears we were informed a few times by the insurance company, but the notice was filed away.
Each account was ultimately paid off by the patients.
The ex-husband received treatment in early May.
A statement was sent out.
Turns out, ex-husband remarried.
New wife sees old wife's name on statement, Husband calls office and requests that ex-wife is removed from account.

Now here is the problem......

My staff, dropped insurance coverage from ex-wife some time earlier.
However, there were still procedures done on the husband that were billed to the prior dropped insurance.
When my staff tried to delete Doris from the account, there was a message that first they needed to remove insurance claims.
So, they deleted the unpaid claims from the attached procedures.
Now the procedures state "(unsent)", but there is no insurance listed.
Ex-wife can not be deleted due to "insurance claims."
New wife is VERY UPSET that ex-wife isn't gone from the account.

Ex-wife's true account had insurance dropped and there is no problem with the account thinking that there still is insurance.
The account history shows a period where there was insurance and a more recent period where there is not.

However, on the ex-hubby's account, there is no insurance listed, but all his treatment since the coverage terminated states "(unsent)".

How can we remove ex-wife once and for all?

Cheers!!

[jordansparks]

You wouldn't "delete" either of them. Once there's any history, that's not feasible. So deleting claims, etc, it not the way to go. Typically, you would archive the unwanted patient. I don't think that gets them off the statement, although it probably should and we can take a look at that. But the obvious simple workaround for that is to change Doris's name to "Archived" or something like that so that even if it does happen to show on the statement for some reason, the second wife won't get upset.

Sounds like the guy didn't pick very well the second time around either.