Every person your practice talks to has a record here. Open Patients in the left navigation (the label follows your practice type: Patients, Clients, or Pet Parents).
The list
- Search by name, phone, or email.
- Filter with the pills All, Active, Inactive, New this month, and Discharged, and sort by recently added, oldest, name, last visit, or recently updated.
- Each row shows contact details, last visit, last update, the next appointment (or a Book link), status, a household tag, and an athenahealth mark when linked.
- Row actions: quick view, open the full profile, book an appointment, and, for owners and admins, permanent delete.
- Select several rows for bulk actions: add to a campaign, mark active or inactive, archive, export.
The ⋯ menu holds Export CSV, Import CSV, and Import from SoftDent (when SoftDent is enabled for the location under Settings → Integrations; upload a printed SoftDent report as a PDF, review the extracted patients, import).
Add patient captures name, phone, email, date of birth, preferred contact method, insurance, and notes.
Quick view and the full profile
Clicking a row opens a drawer with Overview, Payments and Billing (when the location takes payments), Forms, and Medications for athena-linked patients, plus quick actions: send a message, call, edit, create or manage a household, copy the patient ID.
Open full profile shows everything on tabs:
| Tab | What is there |
|---|---|
| Overview | Details, contacts, admin note banner, next-appointment banner with Confirm and Reschedule, activity, appointments, diagnoses, insurance, household. |
| Notes | The clinical workspace: notes, the treatment plan, and outcome measures. See Write and sign clinical notes. |
| Messages | The conversation with this patient, texts and secure messages. |
| Billing | The billing profile, guarantor, charges, and superbills. See The client billing profile. |
| Payments | Payments, requests, invoices, and payment plans. See Take patient payments. |
| Documents | Forms (intake and consent submissions) and Files (intake uploads and staff uploads, with a Visible to client tag on those shared to the portal). |
| Records | Discharge, releases of information, chart export, and the accounting of disclosures. See Discharge and records release. |
The ⋯ menu on the profile header includes Grant portal access and Discharge client.
Share a file with a client
Open the profile, then Documents → Files → Upload a file. Chart uploads accept images (JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP), PDF, Word (.doc, .docx) and plain text, up to 15MB. Give it a name, a category (insurance, referral, records, ID, other) and a note if you like, and tick Make this visible to the client in their portal to share it. The row then carries a blue Visible to client tag, and the client finds it in the portal under Documents → Uploaded files with View and Download. Leave the box unticked and the file stays private to staff: it is not listed in the portal and cannot be reached there by link. Files captured through an intake form (an insurance card photo, an ID) are visible to the client by default and tagged From intake. Delete removes a staff upload from the chart and the portal. If a shared file is not showing for the client, see A client can't see a document in the portal.
Households
A household groups family members. From a patient's quick-view menu choose Create household (named "{Last name} Family" by default, with this patient as head) or Join existing household. Each member's profile shows the Household card with everyone in it, the head marked with a crown, and their relationship. When booking a group session, Add household members adds the rest of the family in one click. Households are per location.
Archive, discharge, or delete
- Inactive hides a patient from the default views while keeping everything; Mark active brings them back.
- Discharge (healthcare practices) ends care properly: the plan closes, measure schedules stop, and the patient moves under the Discharged filter. See Discharge and records release.
- Delete permanently is for records created by mistake, owners and admins only. Real patient records must be retained under record-retention laws; archive those instead.
Good to know
- New arrivals and where they came from are tracked on Review new patients.
- Patients who are due back show up on recall lists.
- Patient records are protected health information, encrypted at rest and covered by your BAA. Every view and change is in the audit trail.