If you've found that your Genie Appointment Book has become slow after years of use, this may be because you've got a great collection of old appointments. The Delete Patient Appointments preferences will allow you to automatically delete appointments after a certain date, so that you don't have to go through and do this manually.
Before you begin
This setting should be adjusted with caution. Once appointments have been deleted using this setting, there is no way to return these to the appointment book. The only option to view these would be by using Genie Solo to access a backup as a reference.
This setting changes depending on which Practice you are currently logged in as, however when appointments are cleared, Genie will wipe all appointments beyond the cut-off period. For this reason, it is best to set this preference the same across your Genie practices.
This preference can be accessed via Appts > Appt Preferences
Delete Patient Appointments After X Days specifies how long you would like to keep a patient appointment record in the Appointment Book.
Delete Non-Patient Appointments After X Days works in the same way as the Delete Patient Appointments After X Days, however it only applies to non-patient appointments (e.g. 'Pharmaceutical Rep Lunch') and appointment types that do not have a patient appointment booked over them.
Setting this to 9999 days will result in appointments effectively never being deleted. However, keeping appointments indefinitely can cause slowness in the Appointment Book. Each time you click a date in the appointment book, Genie must search through all appointment records in the database to find the appointments for that specific day. If you do experience slowness, then we would recommend changing the number of days to a lower number.
Important Note: Once appointments are cleared out in this way it will not be possible to integrate them back into your Appointment Book. The only option to then view these appointments will be in an external reference copy
When the first client machine quits out of Genie for the day, a message will appear asking if you would like to clear out your old appointments now. Clicking OK will delete appointments that are older than the number of days that you have specified.
What Gets Cleared:
- Appointments older than the cutoff days set in Appt Preferences are deleted (if there are more than 300, an additional prompt is given)
- One-time scripts more than 30 days old are deleted
- Deleted appointments more than two weeks old are deleted
- iCal/Outlook synchronisation records for appts and tasks more than 7 days old are deleted
- Banking records more than 300 bank batches old are deleted
- Current referrals which have now expired are marked as such (other than this, a patient's referrals are only updated when opening the demographics window)
- Path/Rad requests more than 12 months old are deleted
- iCal/Outlook synchronisation records for appts/tasks which have been deleted for more than 1 month are deleted
What Does Not Get Cleared
- Deleted appointments marked as "Cancelled by patient".
- Deleted appointments marked as "Did Not Arrive".