What can I do if I can’t find a Patient or Contact?

We frequently receive calls and emails reporting that a Patient or Contact appears to be missing. In most cases, this issue arises due to user actions or settings.

Here are a few things to work through before contacting us :-

  1. Firstly, please check the Recycle Bin, as any deleted Contacts/Patients will go there. The Recycle Bin is located under the Main tab next to Reports & Templates
  2. If you’re searching for a patient/contact but can’t find them, PLEASE double-check that you are spelling their name correctly in the search
  3. Try broadening your search criteria – for example search on the first couple of letters of their name rather than typing the full name e.g. rather than “Smith”, search for “Sm”
  4. You can also search for specific letter combinations within a name by using the % character on either side of the sequence (e.g., %mit%). This will return all names containing those letters, such as Smith, Mitchell, and Mitrani.
  5. It might be that a PATIENT has been incorrectly entered under the CONTACT database (or vice versa). Try checking both the Contact and Patient databases.
  6. If you have multiple clinics in your database, please make sure you have selected the correct Active Clinic for the patient/contact that you’re looking for. Alternatively, at the top right of the Patient/Contact grid, click Grid Options and tick the box “Search all clinics”

99% of the time, one of the above suggestions will help you to find the missing Patient/Contact. ClinicOffice actually has no mechanism to physically delete patient records (which is intentional). It can only ever put them in the Recycle Bin.