Inactive Patients - hmislk/hmis GitHub Wiki

Inactive Patients

Overview

Patient records in HMIS can be marked as inactive (also referred to as deactivated). An inactive patient is completely hidden from all day-to-day workflows — searches, billing, admissions, channelling, and clinical encounters — to prevent any new activity being recorded against that record.

Reactivation restores the patient to normal visibility instantly and is fully audit-logged.

How Active Patients Are Shown (and Inactive Ones Are Not)

Every patient query in the system includes the condition retired = false. This means:

  • Patient search (registration counter, OPD, inward admit) — inactive patients do not appear in results
  • Autocomplete fields — inactive patients are never suggested when typing a patient name or ID
  • Billing — a bill cannot be opened for an inactive patient because the patient cannot be selected
  • Admissions — the patient admission screen cannot find an inactive patient
  • Channelling / appointments — inactive patients are invisible in all booking lookups
  • Clinical (EMR) — inactive patients do not appear in patient search or clinical queue

In short: once a patient is inactive, no staff member working through the normal front-end can encounter or act on that record. The record is preserved in the database for historical reporting and regulatory compliance.

Who Can View Inactive Patients

Only users who hold the Manage Inactive Patients (AdminInactivePatients) privilege can access the Inactive Patients administration page.

To grant this privilege, a system administrator must open Administration → Manage Users, select the relevant role, and enable Manage Inactive Patients under the Administration privilege group.

Viewing the Inactive Patient List

  1. Log in with an account that has the Manage Inactive Patients privilege.
  2. Open the Administration menu → Manage Metadata → Patient Data Management.
  3. Click Inactive Patients.
  4. The page loads a table of all patients whose records are currently inactive, showing:
    • Patient ID (PHN)
    • Full name
    • Date of birth
    • Mobile number
    • Deactivation note

Click Refresh at any time to reload the list.

Reactivating a Patient

  1. Locate the patient in the Inactive Patients table.
  2. Click the Activate button on that row.
  3. The system immediately:
    • Sets retired = false on both the Patient and Person records
    • Records an audit event (event name: Activate Patient) capturing the before and after state, the acting user, timestamp, and duration
  4. The patient disappears from the Inactive Patients list and is once again visible in all standard searches and workflows.

Note: Reactivation does not require a reason or comment at this time. The audit trail records who performed the action and when.

Audit Trail

Every reactivation is logged to the system audit event log with:

Field Value
Event name Activate Patient
Before state {"patientId": <id>, "retired": true}
After state {"patientId": <id>, "retired": false}
Acting user Logged-in user at time of action
Timestamp Server time of activation

Audit events can be reviewed by system administrators in the audit log section of Data Administration.

Deactivating a Patient

Patient deactivation is performed from the individual patient profile page, not from this administration page. A user with the appropriate clinical or administrative privilege can open a patient record and use the deactivation action available there.

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