AtlacareWhen a course of care ends, you don't delete the patient — you make them inactive. Their record stays for your legal retention period; they just drop out of your active list.
Make a patient inactive
From the patient's profile, mark them inactive (discharge). They no longer appear in your day-to-day patient list or count towards your plan's patient limit, but the record — appointments, notes, invoices — is kept intact.
This is what you want almost every time. Health records must be kept for years after the last treatment (the exact period depends on the country and the type of record), so discharging is not deleting.
Inactive vs erased
- Inactive (discharge) — the record is retained, just archived. Reversible. This is the normal end-of-care action.
- Erasure — the record is anonymised in response to a valid right-to-erasure request, and only where retention law allows. This is a formal GDPR process, not a tidy-up. See handling a right-to-erasure request.
Retention
Atlacare tracks your retention window per country and surfaces records that have passed it in Settings → GDPR, so you review them rather than deleting on a hunch. See how retention periods work.
If a discharged patient returns, reactivate them — their whole history is still there.