The incorrect linking of siblings to each other, or of siblings to their Responsible Party (RP) may be noticed in a couple of different ways.
1. When the RP accesses the Patient Portal and can only see one of their two (or more) children.
2. When you, as the office, attempt to post a family payment, and one of the siblings is not visible in the Family Payment screen.
The issue begins with an incorrect workflow when adding new patients. It is recommended that, prior to entering a new patient into Cloud 9, you check the magnifying glass for anyone with that same name. While this is an extra click, it eliminates the potential for families to not be linked as they ought to be.
The screenshot below shows the two magnifying glass icons found on the add patient page that should always be used prior to entering a name manually.
There are a host of reasons why a person's name may already be in your database. If they were a previous patient, if they were a sibling of a previous patient, if they were a referral source for a patient, etc. Using the magnifying glass makes certain we are using the ONE instance in the system of that person, instead of creating a second instance. A second instance of a person is the root cause of people not being linked correctly.
If there is a patient already in your database, and you want to add siblings to their chart, use the same principle. Under the Relationships tab, find the Add button in the bottom right corner. Once the Add Related Person screen opens, find the magnifying glass in the lookup field to locate the ONE instance of this person in your system.
If there is nobody by that name found in that search, then add them in manually. But each time after that, follow the same process, as you will find the individual that you just added. This ensures the relationships show correctly on the Treatment Card screen, that the Responsible Party can see all instances of those for whom they are financially responsible on the patient portal, and allows you to use the Family Payment button of the ledger to apply one payment from a Financially Responsible to all patients for which they are Financially Responsible.
If this issue has already occurred in your database, how do you fix it?
With proper permissions, go to Edit>Setup>People. Search for the name of the person you are looking for. In most cases, the Financially Responsible. If you locate multiple instances of this person, distinguish each of them from the other by adding a different number after the first name of each one. Save your work. Go back into the patient chart and you can clearly tell which version of each responsible party is assigned to each patient. Determine which is the best one to keep. Use the lookup feature in the opposite chart, and find the version of the Responsible Party that is attached to the other patient. Once finished, as you will have to do this for each patient, make certain to go back into Edit>Setup>People, and delete the "People" that was not the correct one, and remove the number after the first name of the person you elected to keep.
Once completed the Responsible Party should be able to be selected when making a Family Payment, and all patients linked to that person will show. Also, if you use the Patient Portal, the Responsible Party will be able to see all the patients that they are responsible for.