Last Modified Time - Retain Older Values in New Column?

[Kevin_Zadoyan]

Hi Airtable Community,

I would really appreciate your help in guiding me towards a solution to my problem. I’m fairly new to Airtable and have a comfortable grasp with basic features and some advanced, but I came across and interesting use case and I can’t seem to figure it out.

My table is focused managing non-identifiable healthcare information for a community based health services organization and we’ve been using Airtable to manage some basic information (about 15 data points in total). The particular case that I’m trying to solve goes like this:

1. When “patient A” changes insurance carries (single select column), I track that as a date change (Last Modified Time column). Using this Last Modified Time column I can sort by most recent date and keep track of the latest changes for weekly reporting purposes.

What I’m trying to accomplish is to have an additional column that will display the previous value of the “single select column” change.

For example, I “patient A” changes from “Insurance AA” to “Insurance BB,” then this column will display Insurance BB as the new value and the Last Modified Time column will display the new date/time of the change. My question is if there is any way to have a column that will display “Insurance AA” as the older value.

The only way I’m able to get this information is by looking at the Row Activity, but would love to see it displayed on the table for easy visual access.

Any help is appreciated.

Thank you!

[Kris_Wigness]

Hi. I tried an approach that might work for you.

(1) Fields Set Up:

• Create a checkbox field called “Change Carrier?” (or whatever you would like to call it).

• Create two fields, “Current Insurance Carrier” and “Prior Insurance Carrier”

(2) Automation:

• Create an Automation that goes as follows:

1. When a Record Matches Conditions: [When Change Carrier is Checked]
2. Update a Record:
   a. Use the Record ID from step one;
   b. change the Prior Insurance Carrier field to equal Current Insurance Carrier;
   c. change Current Insurance Carrier to “[enter new carrier name]” (or some prompt of your choosing)
   d. change the Change Carrier field to 0 (to remove the checkbox)

I’m sure there are more elegant ways to do it, but I’m that should work to preserve the name of the prior carrier.

Good luck!