The Fellowship of the Colorado HMIS Leads would like to formally request a feature enhancement related to the Client Merge tool. Essentially, we would like for the meta data associated with the client profile’s creation date to default to the date of the oldest client record being merged.

Ex:

Jon Smith has two client records, one created on 1/1/2017 and one created on 1/1/2020.

Regardless of which client record is selected as the dominant record to merge, it would be most beneficial if the oldest meta data for the client profile create date remained after the merge (in this example, 1/1/2017).

For context, we’re trying to monitor the number of new client profiles being added to the system and have found that merging duplicate records skews the numbers a bit, particularly if the newer client profile has better data quality than the older. With the current functionality of the merge tool, in order to retain the oldest client profile create date, we’d have to spot-check both records each time to see which record is oldest, and if the oldest record had poor data quality, manually transpose the better data into the older record in order to retain their true client profile created date.