Appointment No Show Fee

Hello,

I’m new to OpenEMR .
What is the best way to handle appointment No show fee?

I have a small physician office that is experiencing high number of no shows that is impacting scheduling.

They want to implement a $25 fee for patient who do not show up for appointments.
The purpose of the fee is to encourage patients to reschedule or cancel in advance.

Two questins.

  1. How to capture the no show fee
  2. How to block new appointments for patients with outstanding balance no show balance.

Is there a best practice for handling this?

We are new and we’re open to suggestions.

Thank you.

Simple approach for us was create inventory of a product with desired description. You can even set pricing levels - e.g. cancellation with prior day notice may be $15. Now you can sell this product and as a bonus keep track of how many such appointments occurred over time.

Of course if you have some development expertise available, please automate this based on appointment status or end of day processing. Community will love it.

Thank you for the suggestion. I do have some development expertise. We are grateful for this community and I can’t wait to give back.

Hello @sovratec
If you already have an inventory set up for other products that your practice sells that would be a very useful way to handle it.
However, if you don’t use an inventory you don’t need to set one up just to handle a no- show fee. You might want to create a custom fee sheet entry, as described in this wiki article:
https://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/HOWTO:_Create_Multiple_Code_Fee_Sheet_List_Categories

OpenEMR allows for the creation of arbitrary items that can be added to the fee sheet which contains the charges for the services rendered in an encounter. It is a fairly simple thing to create a custom charge for ‘No Show Fee’, and have any staff with ‘Clinician’ ACLs (I believe it is specifically the ‘Encounters: coding’ ACL) add that to the encounter’s fee sheet when it’s determined that the patient is a no- show.

That would accommodate your wish to capture the no- show fee. As far as preventing future scheduling of pts one might scan the database’s billing table for any ‘encounter’ that contains the ‘code_text’ of the custom fee sheet item. Then code some sort intervention in the calendar to occur when that ‘pid’ is trying to be scheduled.

Best- Harley

Hello htuck.
Thank you for the suggestions. I’m testing out the fee sheet option from the wiki article and will share my progress with the community. Thank you.