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Overview

This article provides information about how to assign a patient's status, including details about the different status options. It also touches on the process of completing a bulk-inactivation of patients, as needed.  

Related Articles

• Merge Duplicate Patient Charts
• Managing Leads and Prospective Patients

Details

1. Different status types

• Prospective: Patients that have never scheduled or have been waitlisted.  Patient can access the portal. 
• Active: Current patients.  Patient can access the portal.
• Inactive: Former patients.  Patient will not be able to access the portal.
• Deceased: Patients who have passed away.  No portal access.
• Archived/Deleted: Duplicate charts that have been merged, prospective patients that fell through, test patients that are no longer relevant.  Their data will be saved, but the patient will no longer show up in searches or have a chart.

2. Accessing the status menu

To open the patient's chart, expand the Patient Information block, and use the drop down list in the lower right corner.

If you are adding a new patient to Cerbo, the status menu will not be visible.  In it's place will be the option to mark the patient as 'prospective'.  If that is not selected the patient will automatically be added as 'Active'.

 3. How different statuses appear in Cerbo

NOTE: Deleted/Archived patients do not show up in searches and do not have charts.  (More on that later). The image to the right shows how each status will appear when searching a patient chart. The statuses are color coded, and the status for non-active patients will appear in brackets before their name. Note: 'Deceased' patients will show up as [inactive]. The images below show how each status is shown from within a patient's chart. Non-active patients will have a banner across their photo.

4. Prospective, Active, Inactive, and Deceased

These statuses are mostly self-explanatory, however, there are a few things worth noting:

5. Deleted/Archived Patients

In order to delete/archive a patient, the following circumstances must be resolved:

• Unsigned SOAP note(s) - notes are required to be signed before the chart can be deleted.
• Open Task - tasks associated with the patient must be marked as completed.
• Upcoming scheduled event - similar to the previous point, any appointments associated with the patient must be cancelled/deleted from the calendar.
• Upcoming Waitlist event - you will need to remove this from the Waitlist.
• Open Patient Portal Request - pending portal requests from the patient must be resolved.

If you try to archive the patient and any of these items are unresolved, you'll get a pop up that links you to each item so that you can resolve them without having to dig around.  If there are multiple open items you may need to refresh the block after each resolution until all items have been taken care of.

Patients marked as deleted/archived do not have an accessible chart and will not show up in patient searches.  You can access a list of all patients that have been deleted/archived via  Admin>Archived Patients.  From there you can search for a specific patient using the "Narrow List" field.   This will display the list of deleted patients with an option to "Unarchive". If you click on the green arrow and confirm in the following window, the patient will be removed from the archive and added back to the system as a searchable patient with an accessible chart.  Their status will revert to whatever it was at the time they were archived.

6. Inactivating patient charts in bulk

To keep patient accounts current, there are times when it may be useful to perform a bulk-inactivation of patients. This helps to keep your "Active" patient list up to date, which assists with ensuring that your monthly patient portal charge accurately reflects the number of active patients in your system. A breakdown of the different portal tiers are listed below.

• Tier 1 - Up to 1000 active patients
• Tier 2 - 1001-2000 active patients
• Tier 3 - 2001-5000 active patients
• Tier 4 - 5000+ active patients

Inactivating patients who have not been seen for a specific period of time is the most common use-case for this feature. However, you can use any filter's available in Advanced Pt Search (located under the Admin menu). 

Keep in mind that only users with Superadmin permissions have access to the bulk-update tool.

To mass-inactivate patients based on them not having been seen in a period of time, run the Advanced Pt Search based on the Patient Date Filter for "Has not had an appointment between." Set the start date as the beginning of your period of inactivity, and leave the seconf date blank (that will ensure that patients with appointments scheduled in the future will remain active).

For example, if you want to inactivate all patients who have not had an appointment since 01/01/22, you would set the filters as shown below:

It is important to leave the end-date blank, to ensure that patients with appointments scheduled in the future are not inadverently inactivated.

The search results will show any patients who do not have an appointment within the specified time period. At the top right of the results report: 

• Select "Send results to report..."
• Click on Patient Status Change Tool
  

Within the tool that appears, select Inactive under "Select patient status to bulk-apply". Then click Bulk-Apply Patient Status to change the status of all those matching patients to Inactive.

If a patient is inactivated in error, or an inactive patient chooses to return your clinic in the future, simply adjust their status to 'Active' from within their chart.

This article was first published on July 12th, 2017, and most recently edited on May 2nd, 2025

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