Open Dental Forum

What are the differences between marking a patient inactive or archive?

Inactive patients are patients that may some day come back, but for now are not coming to your office. Archived patients are those that are never coming back. They're similar, to be sure, but the Archived patients won't show up in the patient select window.

Would there be a script to change all archived patients to inactive? My front person has been marking all as archived instead of inactive for the past 3 years, and we have been slowly changing as we see them. I did print a list of all archived patients too.

Steven Bloom, DDS

There is query 285 on our query examples page (http://opendentalsoft.com:1942/ODQueryL ... yList.aspx) that will list all archived and inactive patients, giving you a way to see which patients need to be changed. If you call in, we can also potentially update patient statuses from archived to inactive with a custom query as well, though modifying database information via queries is always risky.

So the only difference between archive and inactive is the search function? Why even have the archive function? If the patient calls 15 years later and they dont say they have been a patient you would likely make a duplicate account if the patient was archived. If i am understanding the setup here.

Correct

Inactive: Patient who is no longer active. Will still show in Select Patient window.
Archived: Patient who is not coming back. Will not show in Select Patient window unless Archived/Deceased is checked, so might accidentally end up with a duplicate chart some day.

http://www.opendental.com/manual/patientedit.html

Is there a way to move all inactive patients to archive automatically?

There is not. The Patient Status Setter can change active patients to inactive. https://opendental.com/manual/patientstatussetter.html

Got it! Thank you!
Additionally, is there a way to default the HIDE INACTIVE PATIENTS to stay checked?

There is not currently an option to set "Hide Inactive Patients" to checked by default. There is a feature request for it, #2891, if you're interested in promoting the concept as well.

https://opendental.com/manual/featurerequests.html

I added my comment to it but I do not understand the points system.
Since this is approved, does it mean it will be part of an update?

"Approved" simply means we have determined this to be a valid feature request. A feature request typically arrives at this status a week or two after it is created. When the status is "Completed", that means it will be a part of the next major update. You can add the votes from your office to a request to increase the weight of the request to make it more likely we will implement it.