Patient Archives

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Patients of interest can be saved to an archive file so that followup lists, or useful or illustrative case collections can be maintained. To create an archive file, mark the patients to be saved with a checkmark in the Patient List Window and choose Archive Marked from the File Menu. A standard file save dialog box will appear allowing a name and location for the new file to be specified. To create an anonymous archive in which the patient names, hospital IDs and physician names are converted to arbitrary numbers, follow the same procedure and choose Anonymous Archive from the File Menu.

To open a patient archive, choose Open Archive from the File Menu. Alternatively, you may double-click an archive file or drag an archive file over the LabScanner program icon. Archives are independent of the Import Format (which is used for importing patient data from LIS files), so there is no need to specify or change that setting when opening an archive. Since patients are saved only if checked, patients can be deleted from an archive by opening and re-saving it with the same file name without checking the patients to be deleted. Note that re-saving an archive with no patients checked effectively deletes all patients from the archive (this is why automatic saving to the archive without the save file dialog is not implemented).

Patients can be added to an archive by checking the desired patients in the Patient List Window and choosing Merge into Archive from the File Menu. A standard open file dialog box will appear which will allow choosing the archive file to be merged to. Then a small dialog will appear asking whether patients should be matched by name, birthdate, and/or hospital ID. If one or more of these is chosen, the patients to be added will be compared to patients already in the archive using the specified criteria; if there is a match, the data for that patient will be merged with the existing data. If there is no match, the patient will be added separately. If no matching criteria are specified, all patients are added to the existing archive separately. Note that if you merge into an anonymized archive, the only matching criterium that makes sense is the birthdate. It is likely that some of the arbitrary numbers for name and ID will match, but that match is meaningless.

Since it may be desirable to scan archive files with multiple rule sets, or to share anonymized archive files, archives do not contain rule information or specific event flags based on rule application. These can be regenerated easily by opening the desired rule set before loading the archive and then scanning the archive. If anonymized archives are shared, appropriate rules files should be shared with them.

Archive files can be saved to and opened from any location. Archives are structured internally as XML, so they can be opened and edited with a text or XML editor if desired. In Windows, archive files are saved with a ".ach" file name extension.