You moved your patient list across last week, and every one of them reads as New, with no last visit. Someone you treated in September looks like a stranger, and your Lapsed view is empty because nothing has a history to lapse from. Importing the visits fixes that without inventing a single appointment.
Where it lives, and the two kinds
Go to Settings, find Import data and choose Import your data, then pick what you are importing. The file steps are the same as for any other import, covered in CSV import; this post is about the two history types.
- Past visits: one row per visit. The date is required. Outcome is attended, no-show or cancelled, and a blank outcome means attended. Other systems' wording is understood: completed, seen, arrived and checked in count as attended, missed and did not attend as no-show, and canceled with one l is accepted.
- Last seen dates: one row per patient, with a single date. Each becomes one attended visit, which suits an old system that only keeps a last-seen field.
The upload step has a link to download an example file for either type, to copy the column names from.
Matching and repeats
Patients are matched the way they are for sessions and notes: by patient id if you have one, otherwise by exact first and last name, ignoring capitals. A name that matches nobody is a row to fix in the review table, or you can tick Add patients that aren't found as new patients and rows with the same name share one new patient.
Run the same file twice and nothing doubles. A patient can have one row per day and outcome, so a repeated line is skipped, while an attended and a cancelled row on the same day both stay.
What it feeds, and what it does not
Imported visits count toward Last visit, which also shows a cancelled or missed day, toward the Visits attended filter, and toward care status, where only attended visits count as seen. They appear on the patient's page in a read-only panel, labeled Imported.
They are not appointments and they have no chart, so nothing appears on the calendar, in a notes-to-finish count or in billing. If you need a chart for a visit, import sessions instead; they arrive as imported charts. A wrong file can be taken back with Undo an import.