Have you ever deleted a provider in ServicePoint? What was your favorite repercussion?
- Still seeing it in lists of providers in ART
- Not being able to access the provider admin for the provider, which of course you wouldn’t want or need to do if it wasn’t still showing up in ART, (please see update at the bottom!) or
- In ART, not having a way to filter on whether a provider has been deleted in ServicePoint or not
- Realizing deleting the provider does not remove its answers to provider admin questions like “CoC Code” from the list of possible answers to choose from? For example, say years ago, someone typed in Oh-507 instead of OH-507. Then forever and always, you will have two CoC Codes to choose from in the CoC Code prompt list: Oh-507 and OH-507. And even though it doesn’t really affect anything, it’s really annoying that you cannot fix it due to the fact that you cannot access the provider admin for that deleted provider. (again, see update at the bottom!)
I do get that these “repercussions” are this way so that you can still report on deleted providers, but I think it makes more sense for admins to only delete providers when you can say for sure you will not need to report on those providers anymore. There has to be a point at which admins simply take responsibility just like we do by merging clients, adjusting visibility settings, and all the rest of it. The data standards indicate that all data over 7 years old should be archived, so why the need to keep every last provider, even ones that have closed ten or more years ago?
Short of that solution, it would also work if you could control through the interface whether you are deleting a provider and all its provider data (but not the client data) forever or simply removing it from the list in ServicePoint, from any reporting groups, etc. As it is, you delete the provider thinking you actually deleted it from ServicePoint and from ART reporting, but in reality, you have only prevented yourself from having control over the provider’s admin settings, thus forever locking yourself in to whatever settings existed when you deleted it.
So for now, we’ve decided not to delete any providers.
Then how does one deal with those providers that do not exist any more and haven’t for years? How do you get them to stop junking up your lists in ART and how can you easily distinguish the active providers from the inactive?
We have started to call what we do “soft deleting” or “parking” a provider. Here’s our process for that:
Once we have been notified there’s a provider no longer in business, we take the following steps:
- Go to Provider Admin, pull up the provider, and add “zz” to the beginning of the provider name. This pushes it to the end of the list you see in ART provider lists so that they aren’t junking up everything.
- Look at which assessments are assigned to the provider, go to Assessment Admin, and remove the provider(s) from the list of providers with each assessment. This ensures that users cannot enter assessment data into that provider anymore. It does *not* prevent users from adding Entry Exits or Service Transactions, however.
- Go to the Provider Access tab to check to see which users have access to this provider, then go to each user and remove their access.
- Uncheck the “Operational” checkbox and the “Uses ServicePoint” checkbox. Unchecking the “Operational” checkbox removes it from ResourcePoint and the possibility of referrals being assigned to it. Unchecking the “Uses ServicePoint” checkbox does not really affect much except how the provider looks in the list of providers in Provider Admin, but if you have built custom reports based on the field (which we have), it is important to maintain this field.
- Go to the HUD Standards tab and add end dates to the bed count data, indicating the last date they were open. Or if you don’t know or it’s so old it doesn’t matter, just delete the bed records altogether.
- Maybe: delete the CoC Code. I say “maybe” because if the project being parked still hasn’t fulfilled its reporting requirements, and your reports pull providers based on the CoC Code field, then you should leave the CoC Code populated until you are done reporting on that agency. (If you use that field in your reporting.)
Truthfully, this is a process in flux, and will likely change as we learn more about what we are doing, and what is connected to what. I’m curious to know how others do it or what things we are doing that are maybe unnecessary or if there’s anything we’re leaving out.
Also, when we noticed all the previously deleted providers showing in ART reports and lists, we asked if Bowman would please really delete them and they did actually do that for us. Things have improved greatly since then now that we are not seeing all those old providers.
How do you manage your inactive providers?
UPDATE:
Since this posting, I have learned through Sarah G at Bowman that there is actually a way for us admins to access and edit deleted providers’ admin pages! I actually did it today and solved a lot of problems we have been having. Are you ready?
- Go to Provider Admin and find any provider to click on, it doesn’t matter which one.
- Select the numbers at the end of the URL in your browser. Those numbers are the provider ID.
- Type in the Provider ID of the deleted provider you would like to administer.
- Make whatever changes you want and Save.
This is obviously more of a hack than a feature, but it works, and it beats the alternatives. The reason this has been valuable to us is a lot of those deleted providers had CoC Codes saved to them, and so they were getting pulled into our NOFA and any other report because we tend to use CoC Code as a prompt in a lot of our reports, and since those deleted providers had CoC Codes, they were being pulled in, regardless of their having been deleted. The other way it helped was that I was able to add zz to the front of the name field so that these deleted providers did not show blended in with other active providers.
So- thanks Sarah!
To conclude, maybe if deleting providers works differently one day, we will start cleaning up those soft-deleted providers. But for now, we are going to stick to soft-deleting because there are not currently any advantages to deleting them.