Adding a Nonbillable Clinical Encounter

We are a mental health practice using OpenEMR using 7.0.0-dev. I wanted to know if there was a way to add an encounter that is not billable but needs to be part of the clinical record. Ex. A therapist talks with another provider, and we need to document that disclosure in the client’s record. I looked at the encounter form and didn’t see a natural solution for this situation.

I’d love to know how others handle situations like this.

Best,
Dava

Hi Dava, there’s no way to to do this currently thus you have to manually clear the encounter from the billing manager. It would be a new concept since not billable only equates to already been billed.

Hi Dava-
One workaround you might consider is to create a special CPT code that instead of a number, has text such as, ‘DO NOT BILL’ or ‘CLEAR THIS CLAIM’. That text will be searchable in the fee sheet code search tool just like a code number is, so you can add it in when you’re coding the encounter, along with whatever other real treatment codes you want to track for the encounter.

When you open the billing manager to run the claims, you’d see the claims that need clearing (rectangle in pic below), and could do them all at one time by selecting them and hitting ‘Mark as cleared’ (ovals) before processing the paying ones.

Best- HT

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