When a patient exercises their right to erasure (the "right to be forgotten") under UK GDPR, Atlacare's job is to help you honour it without deleting records you're legally required to keep. It does this with retention-aware anonymisation.
The important thing to understand first
The right to erasure is not absolute. Where you have a legal obligation to retain clinical or financial records, that obligation overrides an erasure request until the retention period ends. Atlacare enforces this for you: a patient's record cannot be erased until their retention period has passed, calculated from their last treatment date and your country's rules. See How do retention periods work?
A record under a legal hold (for a live complaint, claim or litigation) can't be erased at all until the hold is cleared.
What erasure does in Atlacare
Erasure in Atlacare anonymises rather than hard-deletes. The patient's name is replaced with "Erased Patient", and their contact details, date of birth, address, emergency contact, GP and free-text notes are cleared. Portal access is switched off, and any home exercise plans are deleted. The underlying appointment and invoice structure is kept, without personal data, so your accounts and audit trail stay intact. The action is written to the audit log, recording the country and retention period applied.
The practical steps
- Verify the request. Confirm the person is who they say they are before acting.
- Check retention. On the patient's profile, open the ⋯ menu and choose Erase patient (GDPR). If the record is still within its retention period, the dialog tells you the earliest date it can be erased and why. You can explain this to the patient, citing your legal obligation.
- Archive in the meantime. From the same ⋯ menu, choose Archive patient to remove the record from your active patient list. It's kept for compliance and can be restored.
- Erase once eligible. When the retention period has passed, the same dialog lets you click Erase and anonymise. This can't be undone.
Only the owner and managers can erase a patient or place a legal hold.
What patients should do
Patients don't request erasure through Atlacare — they ask their clinic. Atlacare, the software vendor, never receives these requests directly.
This describes how the platform works, not legal advice. For a specific case, check with your supervisory authority (the ICO in the UK) or your professional body. Feature questions? Use the Help button.