Merging Patient Records

Occasionally you might find that you have more than one record for a patient. This may happen when you import patient information, or just from a user accidentally creating a duplicate record. Genie’s Merge Patients function saves you from having to manually recreate patient details in another file to keep all of your patient’s information in the one place.

Before you begin

In order to merge patient records, you will need to be a user with the preference 'Merge patient records' enabled in the Edit Groups window (File > Edit Groups). For more information about security preferences in Genie, refer to the Edit Groups article.

Before you attempt to merge patient records, you should ensure you have a verified backup of your Genie data. A verified backup is a backup from which you have confirmed your data can be restored.

Please note that it is not possible to reverse a patient record merge through Genie. If records are merged incorrectly, a backup will need to be restored to revert the records to how they were.

Please note: prior to merging you should ensure the patient records in question have the exact same name. If they are different, this may lead to the images and attachments of patients remaining in the old image folder and unable to be viewed in the newly merged patient file.

Note: It is our recommendation that the following instructions be carried out in the Genie Solo application on the Server machine when no users are connected to Genie. This is to ensure the patient records you would like to merge are not in use or locked by another process at the time of merging.

Merging Patient Records

1. Go to Open > Patients and search for the patient name. If you have more than one patient with this name, select only the duplicate records and go to Records > Use Selected (note that you can Ctrl+Click to select non-consecutive records on a Windows computer, or Cmd+Click on a Mac). 
2. You can then highlight the two records you wish to merge and select Patients > Merge Patients. Genie will then attempt to merge the records.
   • If the records are exactly the same, Genie will proceed without further prompt. If the account holder records are the same, the record name will be chosen arbitrarily. The record that is not chosen will then be removed from Genie. 
   • If the DOB or name does not match exactly, you will be given a prompt alerting you to this and asking whether you wish to update anyway.
   • If the account holders are different, you will be presented with a window asking you to choose the account holder for the record. 

There are occasional circumstances where you will find that you have multiple duplicate records for a number of patients after importing patient records. As Genie will only allow you to merge two patients at a time, you may prefer the option of merging all of the patients with multiple records at once. In this instance, please contact Genie support who can instruct you further in this process.