Best way to handle multiple appt (same day)

Greetings,

I have a question for the collective brain trust!

What is the proper way to handle multiple appointments at the same facility on the same day?

If we create two appointments in the calendar only one of them auto generates an encounter.

Kind Regards

hi @Kernellinux, the same person has multiple appointments at the same facility on the same day? Is this a common situation for your facility?

Silly question, what steps do you take when checking in the patient for the second visit? Iā€™ll look at the code, but I believe the auto-encounter creation is tied to a status change for the appt

We probably need to allow multiple encounters in appointments i.e. anytime a ā€˜@Arrivedā€™ is selected allow encounter creation. Or some other status that would be appropriate. Iā€™m not sure why we are keen to discourage more than one encounter per day. Maybe billing issue.

1 appt = 1 encounter almost certainly for billing, but really I think billing is tied to the encounter. An ā€œappointmentā€ is just the ancillary stuff

I suppose in the end this would be a matter of convenience unless flowchart would like to see an encounter for each appointment.
We allow a user to create a new encounter for same day and many times a patient may see several providers(mental health comes to mind) during the same visit. Iā€™m sure billing managers know how to bill this use case.
Another use case may be for collecting co-pays before seeing provider where front desk knows they need to collect a co-pay for each encounter(usually collected at check in).
This comes up a lot and probably needs to be address in this release.

WOW!!

Thank you so much for all the responses!

So the issue with the auto-generated encounter is when we go to print a patientā€™s records. Encounters that are manually created do not print.

If this is not the expected behavior of manually created encounters perhaps Iā€™m troubleshooting the symptom not the problem :slight_smile:

Iā€™m being told that insurance would not allow more than one co-pay in a day. Sureā€™d be nice if someone could clarify this for me.
If we allow an encounter for each appointment by doing a checkin/arrival on each appointment in single day, can each appointment be considered a visit thus a co-pay for each.
I donā€™t mind adding this feature and iā€™ve also been told that this was allowed in v4.2.x but first I need to be comfortable weā€™re not breaking a fix or if this is even feasible.
Also, did this work in past versions?
Educate me folks :slight_smile:

Okay here is PR for this and some other issues. Plan to back port to v5.0.1 soon and will put in patch(7).

nice @sjpadgett, pretty sure same day, same pt, same provider = 1 copay

Hi @stephenwaite I look on Billing the same way I did Linear algebra in college , a mystery :slight_smile: Anyway I checked back to v4.2.2 and weā€™ve never allow but one encounter per day so, now we do for whatever reason folks need it for. Canā€™t find a down side.
I almost made a rule that a second encounter had to be to a different provider thinking that would be a reason for a second co-pay but, decided to let user decide.
Maybe this PR puts this to rest.

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Okay I committed to v5.0.2 master. Work flow now is turn on in
Administration->Globals->Calendar->Auto-Create New Encounters


Then whenever you change appointment status to a check in status, an encounter is created.
Also in this PR is a new feature:

Where iā€™ll write up a short explanation at this issue:

If enough folks ask, iā€™ll try to make time to port this back to v5.0.1 otherwise iā€™m good to goā€¦

Thank you so much! This is awesome news! And even a backport wow!!

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Decided not to back port to 5.0.1 and leave as a new feature for 5.0.2.