Importing many patients individually can be a large manual lift. To mitigate this, ThoroughCare has implemented the ability to upload patients in bulk via Secure File Transfer Protocol, or SFTP. To implement this functionality, please reach out to ThoroughCare support to receive an SFTP URL, username, and password. The ThoroughCare support team will also provide you with a CSV template that must be used to import patients.
Patient Upload Mapping
The provided CSV file has headers that indicate fields that ThoroughCare supports importing.
There are four required fields:
Patient first name
Patient last name
Patient birthday
Patient sex
All other fields on the file are optional but can assist your users' workflows as you set up ThoroughCare for your practice.
Setting Up the SFTP Connection
After receiving your URL, username, and password from ThoroughCare support, you can proceed with setting up your SFTP connection. After connecting, you should see the remote file folders appear. There should be two available: "Patient Import Results" and "Pending Patient Imports".
Pending Patient Imports
The Pending Patient Imports folder is where you can drop files to be processed, and the Patient Import Results folder is where the results of the file processing will populate. After you have your patient data formatted in the CSV file, you can drag and drop the file into the Pending Patient Imports folder to be processed. Files are processed automatically every night at midnight. You will know your file has been processed because it will no longer appear in the Pending Patient Imports folder and a new file will appear in the Patient Import Results folder.
Patient Import Results
After the file has been processed, it will appear in the "Patient Import Results" folder prefixed with the date of the upload. The files cannot be deleted from this folder, only downloaded, so this folder will serve as a permanent log of uploads. The files in this folder will detail the results of the upload.
The possible results are "Created", "Updated", and "Errored". If the patient creation was successful and the patient is new, the result will be "Created". If the patient was not new, but there was new information about the patient in the file and that information was updated on the patient's profile, the result will be "Updated". Finally, if there was an error while processing a patient record and the patient was not imported, the result will say "Errored".
Each record in the file will have a result, and any errors encountered while processing will appear next to the result status. The errors may not necessarily be things that caused the patient to fail to upload; they can also be informational.
To access other helpful ThoroughCare articles in the Knowledge Base or to get help from the ThoroughCare Support team members, click the ‘i’ icon in the top right corner of the software next to the username and use the appropriate link!