Creating Purge Rules (Study & HL7)

What are Purge Rules

Purge rules are the tool by which studies and HL7 can be automatically deleted based on chosen conditions.

Rules can be added, edited, and removed either through the User Interface or the web API. This guide provides the steps for both approaches.

Though the UI is quicker to use for creating basic rules, the API offers further configuration options for more granular control.

Purge rules will permanently delete information from the CIMAR cloud. Before creating / running a rule make sure you are aware of what will be effected. If you are unsure please contact CIMAR.

Outbound HL7 cannot be targeted by UI-made rules. It is an account setting configured by CIMAR support and has a default of 31 days

Role Permissions

The following permissions will need to be enabled for the user against all namespaces they intend to purge studies from. Usually only hospital administrators or CIMAR can change your role permissions, if you have the permissions to do so, please read our guide on managing roles.

Purge rules run nightly automatically. However, if you want to force execution users will also require:

How to configure purge rules via the API

What you can do:

Delete studies or delete imaging from studies
Specify date, namespace, and modality conditions
Delete inbound HL7

To navigate to the Purge Rules interface:

Sign-in to CIMAR
Click ‘Administration’
Select ‘Purge Rules’ from the ‘more’ dropdown menu.

Click ‘New Purge Rule’

Name the rule
Enter how many days can elapse before a study is purged.

Set the object type - Study or HL7 and select what date the rule should trigger from

If you select updated date and have selected for the purge rule to trigger after 10 days, then the rule will trigger 10 days after the study was last updated, an example of which could be PHI update, report added, additional imaging added, shared or otherwise updated.

Selecting created date is the date that the study was added to CIMAR.

Selecting study date is the date that the study was originally created before it arrived in CIMAR.

Set the purge rule filters

You can either have a blanket purge across the account, or you can specify further filters against the study. Selecting filtered list of studies allows you all the options you see above.

Association - a tick box list of all the worklists you would like to apply this purge rule to.

Modalities - A list of modality types you would like the purge rule to apply to. Hold ctrl while you click to add more than one.

Set additional settings

Apply rule to minors - Purge studies that match the above filters if the patient is under 18

Apply rule to adults - Purge studies that match the above filters if the patient is 18 or over

Purge to thin - Remove all imaging from the study, but keep the PHI data. In workflows where Query Retrieve is enabled, you can then use this thin to trigger a retrieval from PACS.

Delete Shares - Delete all shares that have been made from the study that has matched a purge rule

Suspend this rule - Stop this purge rule from running indefinitely.

Finally, click Save and your rule will run nightly or can be run manually using the "Run" button. A dry run will test the process without actually deleting any information.

Additional configuration is available through the API purge/add, such as only trigger off of a specific study stage. The link below will provide guidance to configure Purge Rules via the API.

Please contact CIMAR Support if additional guidance is required.