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To prevent untested-patient bloat in the database, the product line has since IT 1000 had the feature to delete upon ADT discharge a patient that has not accumulated any results. This works great in most cases, but does not work well for circumstances where the POC meter is so delayed sending in its result that it is after the ADT attempts to discharge the patient. For some sites, this is a very frequent occurrence.

Therefore, the idea here is to provide a configurable timer (say 1-999 hours) that delays that actual deletion, so that late arriving results still have a patient to match to. Some sites are so affected by late results flow that they have to turn off patient deletions entirely, because it is far more work to have to hand re-enter patient information into the database than it is to prevent the deletions entirely. The problem is, after just a few years of operation, sites are accumulating as many as 10 million or more patients that simply have no results whatsoever, bloating the database with storage clutter.

This new timer would default to zero in General Settings (preferably adjacent to the Yes/No General Setting that enables deleting no-result patients upon discharge already), meaning today's functionality of instant deletions upon discharge continues by default. If it is set to non-zero, then at the time when a deletion is about to occur, a comparison of the discharge date of the patient with the current date/time is made. If the amount of time elapsed since discharge date is greater than the timer value, then perform the deletion, otherwise do nothing and allow the patient to remain in the system. Since the Patient Cleaner runs every midnight by default, it will cause a daily retest of this comparison, so no hidden queue or reprocessing daemon needs to be written at all (since Patient Cleaner does issue discharges even for already discharged patients since IT 1000 2.09). This only needs to be a single comparison added to the patient deletion function.