Background
It is important to be aware that the Intelligent Intake questionnaires that contain questions that map to historical templates have two components: The actual template in the EMR that the data maps to and the template that the patient fills out on the intake. The patient fills out the intake template and that information is then translated into the history template that the practice uses in the EMR.
It is perfectly acceptable to remove an item from the Intake while still leaving that item in the template found in the EMR. As a matter of fact, this is relatively comment. Usually patients have a far limited set of questions that they can see as part of intake compared to what the practice would have available on the EMR.
The issue arises when a practice decides to remove an element from the History template that also exists on the intake.
Answer
It is not recommended to remove data points from a history template. The reason behind this is that there may be patient's that already have data saved in these fields. We recommend disabling the field on this History template and removing the field on the Intake template. Our team of template designers can take care of this for you - simply log a ticket here: Log a Support Ticket.
Dig Deeper
A disabled item on a template still exists on the template, the data is still retained, but it can no loner be used. An example is provided below.
If you were to remove the item from the history template, which is not recommended, data would show up as 'Uncategorized' in the note.
Once the History template item has been disabled, that item can then safely be removed from the Intake template.
When the item is removed from the Intake template setup, the next time the intake questionnaire is accessed, that item is removed.
