Summary
During the lifecycle of your practice, the situation may arise where you need to close a location. This article is created to walk you through that process.
Pre-requisites
To perform these tasks, you will require the appropriate permissions. They are: Edit Library Items, Run Utilities, and Edit Employees.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Also, the second step of this process requires intervention from Cloud 9 Support. This action requires a signed authorization letter, on office letterhead, from the practice owner or doctor, briefly describing the action requested, and their approval for that action to be taken. Please prepare this document before contacting Cloud 9 Support.
Patients Assigned to a Location
If you immediately go to Edit > Setup > Locations, and select the location you wish to delete, and select the Delete button at the top of the screen, you will get the following message.
Let's begin by addressing the first issue, the fact that patients are assigned to this location. To correct this, we will be using one of the Cloud 9 Utilities.
NOTE ON USING UTILITES:
One very important thing to consider prior to using the utilities within Cloud 9 is that they cannot be undone once completed. In this exercise we are deleting a location; in order to do that, we are moving patients currently assigned to Canton to a new location, Atlanta. Once this is done and the utility has been run, there is no difference in the system between them - they are now all Atlanta patients. If they need to be re-assigned after the utility is run, a member of your team will have to go into the individual patients and update them manually.
Go to Edit > Run Utility > Update Patient Utility. That path can be seen here:
The screen you arrive at will look like the screenshot below. In the upper left corner, use the dropdown menu to select Location, as shown. Then click in the list to highlight the location that you wish to update.
In this example, we are updating from the Canton location, and moving those patients to the Atlanta location. Once you have made and verified your selection, hit the Update button.
When this is completed, all patients that had been assigned to the Canton location are now assigned to the Atlanta location. But the job is not yet finished. We need to clear the second half of the error notification, the section regarding transactions being assigned to this location.
Transactions Assigned to a Location
When patient contracts are first created, the money earned from those contracts is assigned to a specific location and provider. If the location is deleted, that money needs to be re-assigned. There is a utility that Cloud 9 Support will need to run in order to move those financials. To complete this task, you will need to reach out to Cloud 9 Support with the information of where the financials currently are (what location you are deleting), and to which location they need to be moved. Important Note: This action requires a signed authorization letter, on office letterhead, from the practice owner or doctor, briefly describing the action requested, and their approval for that action to be taken. Please prepare this document before contacting Cloud 9 Support.
Deleting a Provider
Similar to a location - which cannot be deleted when patients are assigned to it - providers also cannot be deleted if there are patients still assigned to them. To delete a provider, we will perform similar steps to deleting a location. Go to Edit > Run Utility > Update Patient Utility.
Once here, instead of selecting Location from the dropdown like we did earlier in this article, select Doctor from the dropdown menu.
Once you have selected the Doctor from the dropdown menu, another field will appear to the right of the first dropdown, where you can select the Provider Specialty. Once you have selected the appropriate specialty, a list of all providers that meet that criteria will appear.
Choose the doctor record that you are deleting and select the Update button. A new window will pop up to confirm your selections.
You can disregard the Location Filter line, as we are currently updating all patients from one provider to another. You can use this to filter out patients that are assigned to specific locations, but we don't need it in this instance.
In the "Update to:" dropdown, select the provider that these patients be assigned to moving forward. Once selected, choose the Update button on the bottom of the screen. The patients should now be moved from the old provider to the new one.
At this point, with patients no longer assigned to the Doctor, you can (with the appropriate permissions) proceed to Edit > Setup > Employees. Find the provider you are wishing to delete, select them, and then press the red Delete button.
If no error messages appear, the provider has been deleted. If one does appear, it will tell you why the provider cannot be deleted, such as patients assigned to them, and offer suggestions on how to correct the issue.
Conclusion
As previously mentioned, the use of utilities within Cloud 9 is an action that, once taken, cannot be reversed. Extreme care and caution should be taken every step of the way. If you have questions or concerns, stop and contact us prior to making a mistake that cannot be undone.
As always, if you have any further questions please do not hesitate to reach out to Cloud 9 Support by emailing us at cloud9support@planetdds.com, or chatting us online using the chat bubble on the lower right at https://cloud9support.planetdds.com/hc/en-us, or giving us a call during our business hours of 8:00 AM EST to 8:00 PM EST at the 1.800.394.6050 option 2.