We recommend that we set one work station to check for any existing patients that have registered overnight upon logging into OD Link in the morning.  The front desk computer might be a good choice.  If existing patients use a different first name or their birthday does not match the staff does need to fix that before syncing (instructions below).

Click on "New Dups".

Hit "OK" to continue and see a list of all possible duplicates or "Cancel" to get out.

OD Link will let you know how many patient records it found that may be duplicates.  Choose "Sync" to continue or "Cancel" to get out.

In this case, OD Link found 46 possible patient duplicates.  You can see the beginning of the list in the pop up.  If you want to see the entire list, you can grab the corner of the pop up and make it larger.  Click "Sync" to continue or "Cancel" to get out.

When looking through the list, OD Link may find a patient where the First names don't match up but the Birthdates do.  You will see this pop up giving you the chance to view the patients.  Click on "DOB Only" to view the patient.

You might see something like this where there are four possible patients because they all have the same birthdate as the patient who registered on your portal.  However, you can clearly see that they are not the same person.  Nothing matches.  Names, phone numbers, emails.  You can see that they are different patients all with the same birthdate.

To fix this, click on the last patient on the list which is the patient who registered on the portal and you will see at the top in red "Existing PT web duplicate".  Click on the small light x next to that and OD Link will un-mark this patient as a possible duplicate.

You will have to go back and choose "New Dups" to start the process again.

Sometimes OD Link will find two patients who are clearly duplicates because the names and birthdates match exactly.  In that case, you will see this pop up and if you click "Sync" OD Link will sync the two patients for you.  OD Link will combine all parts of the records and keep the most current demographics.

OD Link will let you know when it's done syncing and give you the chance to delete one record.  And if you choose "Delete" OD Link will delete one patient and keep the record with the most current demographics.  If you choose "NO" you can look at them and manually delete if you would rather do it yourself.

If you choose "Delete" in the last step, OD Link will delete and continue on with the process of finding duplicates without you returning to patient window and clicking on "Find Dups".  If the process of finding dups ever stops, you can always return to the patient window and click on "Find Dups" again to start the process.  You can see in this case, we are down to 42 patients.  Watch that number as you go through the process of fixing these.  You will be able to see the number of duplicates found go down as you fix them.

Sometimes a patient has marked that they are an existing patient when they enter the portal.  OD Link looks for possible duplicates but does not find anything by name or birthdate.  You will get a pop up that nothing was found and then you can view that patient.  You could spend some time searching for matching address and phone numbers and names to see if there really is an existing patient.  But chances are, the patient erroneously marked "existing patient" when registering.

Make sure you go into that one patient and mark "Existing PT web duplicate" to get them off your list of possible duplicates.

Sometimes patients register with a slightly different name than they used when they were in your office before.  You might see something like the above.  Two patients with the same last name and same birthdate and same phone number but first names are slightly different.

To fix, change the names so that they match.

Go back into the patient record and under the Web tab, choose "Sync Dup..."

You will get a pop up.  Choose "Sync" to sync the two patients.

Sometimes you will get a list of possible duplicate patients.  Some of the patients on the list are not duplicates but two of them might clearly be duplicates.  To work with only the two records that are duplicates, use the "omit" button to omit patients out of the list that you don't need to work with.  So in this exmple "omit" Mike and Deanna and Kimberly so that you are left with the two Kate/Kathleen.  You can see that Kathleen and Kate are the same patient because last name and birthdate and phone numbers match.

After you have the list narrowed down to the two duplicate patients, fix the names so that they match.  Change "Kate" to "Kathleen" or "Kathleen" to "Kate".

Then go into the patient screen and under the web tab choose "Sync Dup..." You will get a pop up confirming that you want to sync.

There might be a case where you are syncing two duplicate patients and the record OD Link would like to delete actually has an appointment scheduled.  You will get this pop up and if you choose "OK" then OD Link will change the existing appointment to be for the patient record you are keeping and not for the patient record you are deleting.

You might have a case where you have three or more patient records and they are all the same patient.  OD Link cannot sync more than two records.  In this case, you will have to choose and delete patients until you get down to two and then you can use the "sync dup..." feature.  To delete a patient, enter that patient record and choose "Records" at the very top of the screen and then choose "delete record".