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OutSmart Guide

Document Ownership in Multi-Practitioner Clinics

In OutSmart, every document is under the custody of a healthcare practitioner. That model works simply enough in a single-practitioner clinic — there’s only one custodian, and every document belongs to them. In a clinic with several practitioners, ownership becomes a workflow question your team needs to answer together: who holds which documents, and how do you keep them accessible when individual practitioners come and go?

This article covers the conventions that work well for multi-practitioner clinics and how to set them up.

The Custodian Model — Quick Recap

Some foundations to start with:

  • Every document has exactly one owning practitioner at any time.
  • Admins do not own documents. Admin staff always view the Documents Module from the perspective of a specific practitioner — by default, the clinic’s principal practitioner, with the option to switch to view as anyone else at the office.
  • When a practitioner uploads a document, they become the owner.
  • When an admin uploads a document, the owner is the practitioner whose view they’re currently in (the principal practitioner by default).
  • Ownership can be transferred at any time — see Changing a Document’s Owner.

The Principal Practitioner

The principal practitioner is the practitioner whose OutSmart account is the owner of the clinic. When admin staff first open the Documents Module, they’re viewing it as this practitioner. Their documents are the default view.

In a small clinic, the principal practitioner is often the clinic founder — the actual person whose name is on the door. In a larger clinic, the principal practitioner role is often filled by a generic holding account instead (see the next section).

The principal practitioner doesn’t have any special document-ownership powers beyond any other practitioner. The role matters because it’s the default view for admins, which makes whichever practitioner holds the role the natural choice for centrally-held documents.

The Pattern: Centralize Documents Under the Principal Practitioner

When it Makes Sense

This pattern is worth setting up if your clinic wants admin staff to manage documents centrally — sharing them with patients, organizing them with labels, renaming them for clarity — without having to switch views to a different practitioner every time. It also keeps documents with the clinic when individual practitioners leave.

If your clinic doesn’t need centralized document management — for example, if each practitioner handles their own documents and admin staff don’t routinely act on them — you don’t need this pattern. Ownership can stay with whoever uploaded each document.

How It Works

  1. The clinic designates the principal practitioner account as the central document holder.
  2. When any practitioner uploads a document, they change the owner to the principal practitioner right after uploading. (Admins uploading from the default view already have ownership land in the right place.)
  3. Documents are then shared out to individual practitioners as needed — see Sharing Documents With Patients for patient-side sharing; practitioner-to-practitioner sharing follows similar label-based patterns.

The result: when admin staff open the Documents Module, the principal practitioner’s documents — which is now almost everything — are right there in the default view. No view-switching required for routine work.

The Recommendation: Make the Principal Practitioner a Generic Account

In a clinic with stable, long-tenured practitioners, the principal practitioner can be a real person. But in a clinic where practitioners rotate through — for example, where the clinic has many invited practitioners who join and leave over time — tying the principal practitioner role to a real person creates a long-term continuity problem.

If the person leaves, their account leaves with them (or has to be transferred), and every document they own goes with them. That’s a lot of cleanup.

The pattern that avoids this: create the principal practitioner account as a generic clinic account from the start. Give it a name that reflects its role rather than a person’s identity — something like “Smith Health Operations” or “Wellness Centre Records”. Then:

  • Real practitioners (including the clinic founder) join as invited practitioners of this generic account’s clinic.
  • Admin staff join as invited admin staff.
  • The generic account holds documents long-term and never leaves.
  • When an individual practitioner leaves the clinic, the documents stay because they were never owned by that practitioner in the first place.

This approach makes the clinic’s document custody independent of any one person.

Practitioner Workflow: Change Ownership After Upload

If your clinic uses the centralize-under-the-principal-practitioner pattern, the responsibility for changing ownership after upload typically falls on each practitioner when they upload documents to their own account.

The workflow:

  1. Upload the document as usual into your own Documents Module view.
  2. Select the document you just uploaded.
  3. Use the Change Owner drop-down at the top to transfer ownership to the clinic’s principal practitioner account.
  4. The document is now centrally held; admin staff can manage it from the default view.

See Changing a Document’s Owner for the mechanical steps.

Admin Workflow: Catching Up on Documents Not Yet Centralized

If your clinic has documents that have already been uploaded by individual practitioners but ownership hasn’t been transferred yet, admin staff can move them to the central account themselves. The workflow:

  1. Open the Documents Module.
  2. Make sure no documents are selected (press Escape if needed). The top drop-down should be in View as Practitioner mode.
  3. Switch your view to the practitioner who currently owns the documents.
  4. Find the documents (search by patient if helpful).
  5. Select the documents and use the Change Owner drop-down to transfer them to the principal practitioner.

This is a multi-step process per practitioner whose documents you’re catching up on, so it’s worth doing as a one-time cleanup, then asking practitioners to change ownership at upload time going forward.

When NOT to Use This Pattern

Centralizing under the principal practitioner is the right pattern for clinics that want unified document management. It’s not the right pattern when:

  • Practitioners handle their own documents end-to-end. If admin staff aren’t involved in document management, there’s no benefit to centralizing.
  • Practitioners work independently within the same clinic and don’t want their documents visible from one shared account.
  • Specific regulatory requirements require that documents stay with the practitioner who created them. (Talk to your regulatory body if in doubt.)

If any of these apply, leave ownership with whoever uploaded each document.