Person Merge - Merging Duplicate Patient Records in File Maintenance

You can merge duplicate person and patient records. The merge process is based on one of several search scenarios that identify potential duplicate persons. After the application identifies the potential duplicates, you can view the person and patient information details and which practice the records reside in.

When duplicate patients are merged, the application pulls all patient information such as general, status, provider, employer, pharmacy, insurance, immunizations,contact, chart information, allergy criticality, allergy severity and history from the merged record and adds into the retained record. patient notifications for the retained person remain during the merge process. Also, when merging duplicate patient records, the application accommodates pharmacy names up to 70 characters. For example, if the retained person has patient notifications for a practice, only those patient notifications are displayed after the merge. For more information on patient notifications preferences, go to NextGen Healthcare Success Community https://www.community.nextgen.com/ and download the File Maintenance Preferences Guide for NextGen Enterprise . The application automatically merges all the Medical Records templates for both patients along with all other applicable patient data. See the scenario below on how the Demographics template is used to merge duplicate charts.

The following person merge scenario provides a summary of the template data that is merged. If the Demographics template only saves practice-level data, the retained person’s data is kept for that template.

For example, when Patient A and Patient B have to be merged:

• Patient A is the retained person
• Patient B is the merged – or dropped – person. These patients have charts in different practices
• Patient A has a chart in practices 1, 3 and 4.
• Patient B has a chart in practices 1, 2, 3 and 5. The patients have templates saved in each practice:
• Patient A has a demographic template for example, demo 1 in practices 1 and 3.
• Patient B has the same demographic template demo 1 in practice 1, 2, 3 and 5.

For example, when keeping patient A and merge patient B:

When you assign templates and elect to keep Patient B’s demo 1 template, you see the following after the merge:

• All cross-reference fields such as, medications, allergies, have been merged so that it is a cumulative list of Patient A and Patient B.
• In practice 1, Patient A’s demo 1 template has the data previously saved in Patient B’s demo 1 template.
• Any common fields such as, name, address, have been overwritten with patient B’s data.
• Patient A now has a chart created in Practice 2.
• The demo 1 template has the data previously saved in Patient B’s demo 1 template.
• In practice 3, Patient A’s demo 1 template has the data previously saved in Patient B’s demo 1 template.
• Any common fields such as, name, address, have been overwritten with patient B’s data.
• In practice 4, Patient A’s demo 1 template has no data in the demo 1 template.
• Because Patient B never had any data in practice 4, when selecting Patient B’s data, it overwrites the template with blank data.
• Patient A now has a chart created in practice 5.

The demo 1 template has the data previously saved in Patient B’s demo 1 template.