Running 7.0.3 on Ubuntu Server.
I have changed my Appointment Statuses list to be more streamlined and appropriate for my outpatient mental health setting.
When I change the appointment status while looking on the schedule, an encounter is never created. Right now i seem to only be able to manually create encounters. How can I resolve this? Here’s a screenshot of my admin > lists view.
By default, OpenEMR is set to generate an empty Encounter when a patient’s status has been set to “Arrived (@)”.
I thought that was the case. I though perhaps the “check in” and “check out” boxes were there for this. Is there any way to change the auto-generate behavior?
The flow of my practice (outpatient mental health) doesn’t involve any kind of checking in system. The provider gets their own patient at the time of the appointment, has the appontment, then discharges the patient, all on their own. The status “arrived” isn’t really relevant in this flow.
I’m trying to streamline what the provider has to do to get an encounter started. Ideally the encounter would be tied directly to the appointment type on the schedule, so that whenever a psychotherapy appointment was scheduled, the encounter would generate automatically. I’m not sure what the other options are.
Any ideas about how to make things easier?
Any status can be either a check-in OR check-out status, but not both. your screenshot showing both.
Thanks to claude.
Thanks for that link!
A deeper dive and poking around revealed that the auto-generation of an encounter on status change only works when changed on the same calendar day as the appointment (at least in my current version 7.0.3).
It would be preferable for me to be able to auto-generate an encounter at any time. I suspect this would be very beneficial for most outpatient PP mental health therapists who don’t have an admin staff tracking their encounters. In my 5-10 minutes in between appointments, I have to change the appointment status, make the encounter, and write my session note. Any streamlining of the workflow helps a lot!
Hello @BenFosterPsyD
I can’t tell if you have seen these resources. One from the EMR globals, the other from the OpenEMR wiki.
The first is the global / config setting referring to this calendar behavior. It restricts the NUMBER of encounter forms that can be generated.
The 2nd controls which activities will trigger the creation of an encounter form.
You can unselect @arrived so it doesn’t generate an enc form, and you can make any status you wish generate one. Or manually generate one at any time.
Let me know if this is not clear.
Best- Harley
Hey Harley, thank you for this. I’m still pretty new to openEMR and am not used to navigating the wiki, and the direct links are helpful.
For my uses it really would be helpful to be able to make auto-generation of encounters occur at any time and not be tied to the exact date of the appointment.
For what it’s worth, I was able to jerry-rig this functionality by making a change in the DOBandEncounter() function within the “…/add_edit_event.php” file which is where the auto-creation of encounter behavior is defined.
Essentially one of the lines checks to see if the date of the encounter is today’s date, and if it is, allow auto-creation, if not, just move along. This is where I jerry-rigged things to ignore the checking of today’s date
It would be immensely helpful for folks like me (i.e. mental health practitioners, perhaps others) to have an option in globals/config (perhaps near the Auto-create New Encounters option) that allowed bypassing of the today’s date check. Not too cumbersome of a change and could be easily ignored by most users I imagine.
Since I’m a newbie here, is there anywhere you can direct me to suggest such a feature?
The ‘auto generation of encounters’ can be done at any time: when on the pt dashboard, click the ‘+’ button (oval below)
If you don’t want the encounter you created to be for today, change the ‘date of svc’ to the desired date.
It’s amusing (but not unexpected) to me how so many people in this forum are oriented to re-coding the EMR if it doesn’t do what they want right off the bat. I came up through the UI orientation to OpenEMR and have found that its set of features is incredibly deep, even if poorly documented. The answer to many questions is in the wiki.
Speaking of which you might find this useful:
Check the wiki before you re-code! It prevents you from ending up with a massively customized application that must be completely re- customized when you upgrade versions!
Best- Harley
