The Records Menu

The items in this menu allow you to manipulate the records of the table currently on display.

Use Selected reduces the records on display to just those which are highlighted. You would typically use this when sending a merged letter to a group of patients. Suppose you want to send a letter to everyone of a particular age. You would do a Search using Records > Search to find the relevant patient records.

There may be 500 records found but you want to send them out in batches. Initially you may only want to send it to those patients whose surname begins with “A ”. In this case, you would highlight that subsection of patients by shift-clicking,and then choose Records > Use Selected so that now only that subsection of patients is on display, and then select and print the letter.

Alternatively, you may want to print a label for John Smith. So you would do a find for “Smith J” and be presented with perhaps 20 records. If you do a label while all 20 records are on display you will get a label for each of these records. In this case, you would highlight the one record you want, select Records > Use Selected, and then print the label.

This will display all the records for the current table on display. Alternatively, you can use the View All Records

button.

Replace allows you to replace the contents or part of the contents of any field in all of the records currently on display. This can be a very useful, but dangerous feature and should be used with care. Only the Administrator has access to this feature.

Two doctors amalgamate their practices, but want to “own” their own patients whose records are going to be imported from another software program. They decide to use the "Custom" field in Genie to specify which patients belong to each doctor by putting their own initials into this field.

This would be very time-consuming to do it one by one into each record. A better way would be:

4.	Click on the View All button to display all the patient records.

5.	Select Records > Replace to open the Replace window.

6.	The All Contents radio button is selected by default.

7.	Click on the Field popup menu and select the Custom field.

8.	Enter the initials of the first doctor in the Value area.

10.	You will be asked to confirm that you have the right field and value selected. If you are sure you’ve got it right, click on the Replace button to go ahead with the replacement.

11.	Import the second doctor ’s patient records.

12.	Select Records > Search and search for records where the field Custom is not equal to “JS”. This will display all the second doctor’s patients.

13.	Use the Replace function again to add his initials to the Custom field of all the displayed records.

The local council, in its wisdom, decides to change the name of Bourbong Street back to its original, but non-politically correct ,“Bourbon Street”.

3.	Click on the View All button to display all the patient records

Note: You could do a Search at this stage to find all patients where the Address Line 1 field contains “Bourbong” but it’s not really necessary.

4.	Select Records > Replace to open the Replace window.

5.	Click on the Text string radio button, and enter “Bourbong” into the top value area.

6.	Select Address Line 1 from the Field popup menu.

7.	Enter “Bourbon” into the lower value area, then click the Replace button.

To perform a simple sort e.g.by Date of Birth, click on the DOB header in the Patients list.

This allows you to find duplicate patient or address book records. You might use this after converting data from another program where duplicate records may have been created.

To ensure we don't assume that each patient has a unique full name, we will search on the Surname, First Name and DOB fields.

1.	Click the View All button to display all the records in the database.

Note: If you have very large patient database you may want to do this in sections. You could first find all those patients whose surname begins with “A” for example.

2.	Select Records > Find Duplicates to open the window shown here.

3.	Select Surname from the popup menu, then click the Search button. This will display all records where more than one patient has the same surname. If you started with 10,000 records you’ll probably still have about 8,000 records on display.

4.	Repeat the above steps using the First Name and DOB fields to progressively narrow the search. When finished, if there are any duplicate records in the database they will be displayed on screen.

5.	Highlight the offending records and merge them using the Patients > Merge Patients menu item.

See the chapter on The Patients Menu for more information for more information on merging..