This might be a dumb idea, but I am thinking about doing it for my practice to prevent the embarrassing error of thinking I am in a current new encounter but I am really altering an old one.
It occurred to me that if the list of past encounters did not exist, I would never be in this situation. I really don’t need it. I can generate a report to look at past encounter data.
So, leaving an encounter will be signing it since there will be no way to get back in. So what do I do if I forget something or need to change something? Start a new encounter!
Cant it just be made uneditable (Read-Only) or displayed in a different color (ie if todays date is not the same as the encounter date display in Red).
Just an Idea.
I think when you look at approaches like that, you have to consider that individual forms are autonomous to some degree in their policies for editable status. We could insist on a consistent policy for all form authors to follow or control things centrally.
I used the rule that you suggest about checking if the date of the encounter is different from the current date. I used to have this as default in camos. It worked well for me but would not be good for physicians who work in 24 hour facilities and it would have to be used by all forms to protect an entire encounter.
I was just trying to come up with the simplest solution that might involve commenting out a line or two and would be optional. I agree that it might be hard getting used to. I am going to try it out this week and see how it goes.
I implemented this today and it worked really well. It took one statement: an exit(0); at the top of encounters.php. This made it so when I finished working on the current encounter and closed out of it, I had no way to get back in to that one or previous ones.
Then, I did a little more. I set up a link in encounters.php that opened a new tab with a pdf of the last six months of progress notes, generated by notegen.php in camos. This felt more like flipping through a real chart than the old way of doing things. It took a little getting used to, but it gave me a sense of security. So, what do I do if I need to add to an existing encounter? I start a new one. I use encounters for everything. I differentiate actual patient visits from other types of encounters with billing codes.
There has been much past discussion of how to sign and lock encounters with many different complex solutions proposed, but this is a simple one-liner that seems to work suprisingly well.