So I am looking to modify the Calendar to add some additional developer extension points. My main goal is to support Telehealth but what I’m interested in is trying to understand what changes will best support the OpenEMR for reporting and billing on Telehealth specific appointments as I know many providers have different fees/insurance reimbursements for Telehealth visits vs in person.
My biggest requirement is distinguishing an appointment as a Telehealth appointment. The additions that @juggernautsei and @brady.miller worked on for the Lifemesh Telehealth module keys off the name ‘Telehealth’ in the title of the module. What I’m wondering about is if it makes sense to have actual calendar categories specific for telehealth. Similar to our current categories of ‘New Patient’ and ‘Established Patient’. You could have a ‘New Patient Telehealth’ and ‘Established Patient Telehealth’.
Another option would be to add a new category type called ‘Telehealth’ in addition to the ‘Patient’, ‘Provider’, ‘Clinic’, and ‘Therapy Group’ types we have.
A third option would be to have a checkbox on each appointment created that would mark an appointment as being telehealth or not which allows any category / category type to be re-used but may not tie into things like the fee sheet that the system currently does with the appointment categories.
I’d love to hear from billing & reporting folks on if any of these options would have an impact on them.
For future module writers I’m going to make it so you can tie into the calendar appointment and render your own custom html for each rendered appointment. In my case I will be adding a video icon to each Telehealth appointment.
I will also be adding hooks to the patient portal so a module writer can add javascript as well as html to the patient portal page. In my case I will be tying into the system to trigger an event whenever an telehealth appointment is opened to send a patient to a telehealth waiting room.