You can archive and delete your patients within Cliniko if you need to. If you archive a patient, they'll be hidden from your patient list, reports, and you won't be able to add an appointment for them—however, their details will still remain in Cliniko.
If you delete a patient, some information — communications, file attachments, letters, and treatment notes — is permanently removed and can't be recovered. Appointments, invoices, and payments are retained for your records and reporting.
Please keep all legal obligations in mind before deleting a patient from Cliniko!
In this article, we'll discuss:
Archive a patient
All security roles except Bookkeepers can archive and unarchive patients.
Select the patient you'd like to archive, and click the Archive button on their file:
You'll then see the date/time that the patient was archived, as well as the ability to make them active again:
An archived patient will show up as grey in the patient list:
If you need to review their details, just click their name—and if you need to unarchive them, click Make them active again!
What happens when a patient is archived
When you archive a patient, they're hidden from your patient list and reports (like Patients without upcoming appointments), and you won't be able to select them when creating bookings or raising invoices. Their data isn't deleted—it's just hidden from view while everything stays intact.
An archived patient:
won't be sent appointment-related communications, like reminders and follow-ups
won't be sent group emails or group text messages
will be unsubscribed from Mailchimp, if you're using the Mailchimp integration (this doesn't remove them from Mailchimp completely — you'll need to delete them there separately if that's what you're after)
Keep in mind, if an archived patient books an appointment online, Cliniko won't match them to their archived record. Rather, a new patient record will be created for them instead. If this happens, you can unarchive the original patient record and merge the two.
Delete a patient
Only administrators can delete patients.
After a patient has been archived, they can be deleted.
Deleting a patient will also delete most of their associated records, such as treatment notes. Please keep all legal obligations in mind before deleting a patient!
Find the patient you wish to delete, and click the Delete button:
A "warning message" will pop up, which is a last step in safeguarding this process, in case the delete button was pressed in error. You will need to type the patient's full name into the text field in order to activate the Delete button:
Once you've typed their name in, the Delete button will "turn on":
As soon as you press that button, the patient will be permanently deleted from Cliniko. This is irreversible.
What happens when a patient is deleted
The following is permanently deleted and can't be recovered:
Communications
File attachments
Letters
Treatment notes
While most data will be deleted, some data is retained for your records and reporting:
Appointments — any appointments for the deleted patient are removed from the calendar and archived. Archived appointments are hidden from your account entirely but if you'd like to view a record of this, you can generate an attendees data export.
Invoices and payments — these are retained in full (they're not archived) and will appear in your finance reports.
You can choose how appointments, invoices, and payments appear after a patient is deleted (whether anonymised or having their names retained) by updating your settings in Settings → Patients → Patient privacy, under Patient anonymisation. For more information on this, check out our anonymise deleted patient records guide.
Deleting a patient from Cliniko won't remove their records from any integrations you use, such as Xero or Mailchimp. You'll need to remove their data from those separately.
You cannot reverse a deletion once it's happened, so delete at your own risk!