I agree with both Bert and Chris. Let me give you the thinking that went into the question .
Some years ago Indy merged my 2 databases of patients. There were inevitable duplicates although most of them were merged. There are also a fair number of patient who were never seen under 1 patient ID and put under another (no visits). We have been inactivating them as we go along.
One day I was on a spree of inactivating. I would click on one patient and see that the next patient had no visits and had insurance information from 2012 or so, thus I started inactivating them as well. But then, I looked at patients who had not been in the office in > 5,7,or even 14 years. Some of them were in their 30's.
I will not take a new patient from the age of 18 on, although I will generally keep my patients through the age of 22. A 17 year old not here in 10 years is not coming back. I started to consider at what point I should consider deactivating them.
So I did start to deactivate patients > 5 years who were over 23 years old. I came up with over 700 patients. That's when I began to wonder whether I could bulk deactivate. Since it could not be done, I dropped the idea to deactivate by bulk and still plink off a chart that I will see on the main screen that is very long not used.
Now once a patient has been deactivated, all you have to do is click on the "ALL" button to the right of the DOB field and they will show up. If you go to demographics on the right side there is a check box that is clicked (on a deactivated patient) that states inactivate with a drop down below giving the reason (which will be red if it is deactivated from the main screen as nothing has been selected). By unclicking this box you can reactivate a patient.
So they are not really "lost", they just don't show up under the regular active button. You can include them in searches, or look for them by the same measure. They are not overwritten.
