Patient Management in Dermi Atlas

Clinical photography platforms live or die by how well they organize patient data. A system that captures great images but makes it difficult to find, manage, or report on patient records creates friction in the clinical workflow.

Dermi Atlas was designed around the patient record as the central organizing unit. Every image, clinical entry, comparison, and report connects back to a structured patient record. This article walks through how patient management works in Atlas and why the design choices matter for clinical practices.

A Structured Patient Record

Atlas patient records capture the demographic and contact fields that clinical practices need without requiring excessive data entry. The only required field is a unique identifier, supporting 2 to 32 characters composed of lowercase letters, numbers, underscores, and hyphens (input is automatically converted to lowercase). Every other field is optional.

Available fields include:

• Full name, first name, last name
• Email, primary and secondary telephone numbers
• Address and health card number
• Birth date, height, weight, gender

This flexibility matters because different practices have different identification conventions. A dermatology clinic might use medical record numbers, while an aesthetics practice might use a simplified naming scheme. Atlas accommodates both without imposing a rigid format.

Each patient record also holds computed metadata: total image count, total entry count, last appointment date, and last modified timestamp. These values are updated automatically as clinical data is added, providing a real-time summary of each patient's imaging history without manual bookkeeping.

For the complete guide to creating and managing patient records, see Managing Patients.

Organization Through Tags

Atlas includes a tag management system with color-coded categories. Tags can be assigned directly to patients, clinical entries, and individual images. Tags assigned to images automatically inherit upward to their parent entries, providing a layered classification system without manual duplication.

In practice, this means a dermatologist could tag images with specific conditions (by diagnosis or body region, for example), and those classifications would be reflected at the entry and patient level automatically.

The Patient Database supports filtering by tags, making it possible to find all patients with a specific tag combination across the practice's patient records. Combined with sort options and date range filters, tags provide a structured way to organize and retrieve clinical records at scale.

Built-In Consent Records

The platform includes a configurable consent enforcement system with three levels:

• Disabled: No consent prompts are shown.
• Advisory: Consent is recommended and a warning is displayed.
• Required: Consent is mandatory before image capture is permitted.

Consent can be captured digitally (with a signature) or verified externally (verbal, written, or other methods with optional notes). Each consent is recorded with its date and time, and revoking consent removes it from the patient record. Under Comprehensive audit logging (the default), recording and revoking consent are each logged.

Each consent record documents the patient's authorization and is designed to support HIPAA, PIPEDA, and the Australian Privacy Act; compliance remains the responsibility of each practice. For detailed compliance information, see the HIPAA Compliance Guide, PIPEDA Compliance Guide, and Australian Privacy Act Compliance Guide. For a broader overview of the platform's security posture, see Security and Compliance Fundamentals.

Clinical Entries as Visit Records

Each patient visit is documented through a clinical entry. Entries record the appointment date and time, clinical notes, workspace images (drawn from the patient's image pool), and image comparison groups for before-and-after review.

Entries support three collapsible sections (workspace, comparisons, tags and notes) so clinicians can customize their view based on the task at hand. All changes sync in real time, with a visible save status indicator, ensuring that data is saved as it is entered rather than requiring a manual save step.

The combination of structured entries and real-time synchronization means that clinical documentation keeps pace with the consultation, rather than becoming a separate administrative task after the patient has left.

For a complete walkthrough of entry creation and management, see Clinical Entries and Appointment Notes.

Finding Patients Quickly

The Patient Database provides four sort modes (last modified, last appointment, unique ID, and name) with ascending and descending options. Filters include date range, tags, assigned members, and whether a patient has entries, images, or full body sessions. Pagination supports up to 100 records per page.

For practices managing hundreds or thousands of patient records, these tools make it possible to locate a specific patient or a subset of patients matching clinical criteria without scrolling through an unstructured list. The search field provides direct lookup by unique ID or name for the fastest access path.

Deletion with Audit Accountability

Deleting a patient requires typing a specific confirmation phrase and cascades to all associated entries and images. The outcome depends on the Data Deletion Policy set in Dermi Atlas Manager. Under Recoverable and Standard (the default), deleted patients, entries, and images stay recoverable from within Dermi Atlas Professional for the configurable retention period; under Permanent they are removed at once.

When a patient is deleted, Recoverable keeps the patient's earlier activity for the retention period, while Standard and Permanent remove it at once. Under Comprehensive audit logging, deletions made under the Recoverable or Standard policy, along with all other significant operations, are captured in the platform's audit logging system.

Availability

Every feature described here is available in Dermi Atlas Professional, the on-premises deployment designed for clinical use. The Atlas Cloud Demo provides access to core workflows for evaluation, though some capabilities are restricted, including patient detail fields and audit logging. For more on deployment options and the security architecture behind patient data protection, see Our Approach to Patient Data Security.