Jane's Guide

Here's all the help you need to use Jane.


Deleting Patient Data

  1. Privacy
  2. Deleting Patient Data

    3. 9 min read
    Balance Plan Practice Plan Thrive Plan Legacy Plans

Is a patient requesting their data be deleted from your system? Or has the time come for data to be destroyed as it’s hit the mandatory retention period? To help support for when that time inevitably comes, we’ve outlined the deletion options available to you below!

We’ve been careful in designing Jane to make sure that we (and you!) can remain compliant with legal and regulatory requirements to keep and remove patient data. Some colleges require that data is kept for up to 16 years or more, so we’ve made sure Jane has procedures in place that align with the Standard Codes of Practice across multiple health professions.

Note 📍: Unsure of your record-keeping obligations or what options you can or should pursue? We’d recommend chatting with your regulatory or licensing body, college, or even a lawyer, to be sure you’re meeting the requirements for your region and discipline.

Requests from Patients

The Jane Account Owner is considered the legal Custodian of all the data in the account. This means that Jane cannot legally make decisions to delete or make changes to a patient’s data independently.

For more information about this, check out our Terms of Use.

Are you a patient of a clinic that uses Jane and have with questions regarding your patient record or would like your data deleted? You’ll want to contact the clinic you attend directly with this request 💙

Deleting Patient Records Individually

If you’re looking to delete a couple of patient files at a time, Jane has some clever built-in features to do this! Before deleting that profile, you’ll first need to delete all the data associated with that profile, including charts, billing records, and appointments.

You can check out the guides below for more information and steps on how to do this:

If you need to delete a chart entry signed by a patient, (such as the completed Questionnaire from a patient’s Intake Form), this can be done by the Account Owner.

Deleting Patient Records in Bulk

If you as the Account Owner are looking to send a request to delete a large amount of data our way, you can send an authorization letter to our Privacy and Security Team by email at [email protected].

This authorization must be on your clinic’s letterhead outlining what needs to be deleted, and the letter should include:

  1. An introduction of who you are as the Account Owner and what you are requesting
  2. The initials and patient profile number of every patient
  3. The URL / Jane link to each patient’s profile.
  4. If you’re only asking that chart entries be deleted (and not entire patient profiles), we’ll need also the dates and authors of each chart entry to be deleted per patient
  5. Your signature as the Jane Account Owner and legal data custodian

Pro-tip💡: Only the GUID and Patient Numbers are exported using the Patient List Report. However, if you head to the patient’s profile, you can use the link and update the numbers at the end that correspond with the GUID from the exported report. From there, you can provide these links in the letter.

Since the Jane team would also have to manually delete these records, our turnaround for these requests can be 3 months or more, depending on our current volume of requests. So if you need records deleted more urgently, you can do so within your clinic by following the above steps to Delete Patient Profiles Individually.

Making Patient Profiles Anonymous

Rather than deleting a patient profile and its contents, another option would be to anonymize or de-identify a patient profile. This may be necessary if you need to remove a patient record but the patient’s profile has Jane Payments transactions present.

Note 📍: Jane Payments transactions cannot be deleted because they are a record of actually being processed by Jane and these financial records are required for tax purposes. These integrated payments are connected with your clinic’s reporting and removing them would cause a lot of problems!

In these cases, you may still choose to remove pieces of data (such as charts), and this can also include editing and removing data from the patient profile fields (such as name, contact info, etc):

After everyone is as anonymized and de-identified as you need, you can Discharge / Archive the Patient Profile, if you’d like.

Compiling a List of Your Patients

Perhaps it’s been a few years and you’re realizing that you have more than a few profiles that need to be deleted. No problem! You can use the Patient List Report to easily compile this information — you can even export this report in a spreadsheet format and use tools like Microsoft Excel to make the process even easier.

Note📍: If you export patient data to work with outside of Jane, you’ll want to be aware of your privacy requirements. For example, best practices include making sure identifying patient data remains on your device only and is not emailed or uploaded to the cloud. Additionally, for Covered Entities in the US, making sure you’ve signed a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with any vendors involved in working with that patient data.

To access this report, a Full Access user can head over to the Reports tab and then select Patient List from the left sidebar menu.

There are a couple of handy filters that can help narrow down the information. The data in this report can be narrowed down by staff member, active/inactive patients when their profile was created and by their last appointment date.

Once you’re all set with the list, you can export this report to Excel by clicking on the three horizontal black dots in the top right corner.

Hot tip 🔥: You’ll notice a column for Last Visit Date in the Patient List report — in Excel, you might find the “Sort” function handy to use with this column to order your patients by their last appointment with you. That way, you can quickly find the clients you haven’t seen for the longest period of time!

For more tips and tricks with exported Jane reports, check out our guide on Exporting Reports and Customizing them in Excel

Deleting Your Jane Account Entirely

If you’ve cancelled your Jane subscription and are looking to have your entire Jane account deleted, this is something we can do by request from the listed Account Owner.

Rather than sending in your authorization to delete all the individual patient profiles and charts, just send an email with your request to our Privacy and Security Team at [email protected].

From there, we’ll send you a standard authorization and consent form to sign before proceeding with the request. If you need to keep any of these records externally to Jane, you can always Export Your Jane Data before you make this request.

As a reminder, if you are a patient requesting to delete your account or profile, this request would need to be sent to the clinic directly.

If you have any questions about how to work with your data in Jane or how to export reports, you can contact our support team.

And if you have questions about the process of submitting a data deletion request to our team, you can reach out to our Privacy and Security Team directly at [email protected].

For general questions about security at Jane, you can check out our Security FAQ guide!
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