You work hard answering phone calls, greeting clients, registering new patients, and scheduling follow up visits all from your command center. That’s when you notice that Sally Smith is in your Ahlers system multiple times! Two clients, same name, same date of birth, but different chart numbers. Oh no! (Cue the dramatic music) Someone has created a duplicate patient in your otherwise pristine Ahlers system.
Verifying patient information is no laughing matter but regardless mistakes can and do happen. When the patient doesn’t have any historical records it’s easy just to verify the right chart number and delete the incorrect one. But what happens if the patient record has one or more historical visit records? And has them in multiple modules (billing, lab, pharmacy, cvr, etc.)?
Ahlers & Associates Customer Service offers a program that allows you to merge the patients into one client number. Instead of trying to re-enter visits, lab work, dispensed prescriptions and then change the wrong patient record’s name to “DO NOT USE”, you can use the merge to combine these 2 patient accounts into the right patient record, and preserving all the hard work you’ve already done
Ahlers & Associates Customer Service will be glad to give you the program, do a quick tutorial for you and/or your staff, and walk you through several merges until you become comfortable with the process. That’s when you’ll become Merge Happy!
BTW, if you’re a PracticeSuite user, there is also a way to merge patients in the EMR as well! Contact Customer Service by phone, email, or even use our new CHAT ONLINE feature!