hitechelp wrote on Thursday, October 04, 2012:
To further expand on that;
Getting “Checkout” to work well for you may be a simple procedural adaptation.
This is what we came up with; (We’re using v4.1.0 (11))
1. Patient arrives > change calendar status > encounter auto generates
2. Front office creates and saves fee sheet (CPT is known but, no diagnosis code from doctor yet)
3. Doc sees patient
4. Front office completes “Checkout” and changes calendar status to “Checked out”
5. Front office Re-Opens encounter. (Fee sheet can now be completed)
Obviously, this won’t work for everyone.
Since there are multiple ways of entering co-pays and receiving payments, one must understand how these different methods interact with administrative and financial procedures before setting said procedures in place.
Without sufficient documentation you either hire someone or learn by trial and error as we did.
Multiple ways of doing a thing make a system adaptable but undocumented ways can create inconsistent results.
My two cents worth of POTO (pointing out the obvious) and some ideas are offered below;
We stopped using the “Add Copay” button on the Fee Sheet because it creates a negative value (an accounting black hole) instead of a payment that can be safeguarded with a daily accounting reconciliation as “Checkout” allows us to do. Its like having a cash register. Payments received this way are not as likely to disappear, and receipt printing is easy.
“Payments” is the accountants way to accept money, but it’s time consuming and requires many steps to achieve nearly the same results as “Checkout” (payments received using Checkout can not be searched like those in “Payments”)
Having the “Checkout” amount auto-fill from “CoPay” under “Insurance” would be more useful than the current scheme, as long as you can still modify it (needed for split payment purposes). Any amount could be set and called from there.
If “Checkout” could change a patient’s status in the calendar to “Checked Out” that would save a step.
And, instead of showing “CO-PAY” as a minus (-$xx.xx) in the “Bal” column on the “Past Encounters” (billing view),
have it zero out when paid in full, (as it does when using “Payments”) which gives a nice clean appearance, no confusion.
And lastly, no apologies for all the different ways I’ve referred to “Co-Pay” because each instance appears in quotes as it appears on the screen to which it refers.
“COPAY” on the Fee Sheet, “CO-PAY” on Past Encounters, “CoPay” on Insurance, “Copay” on Edit Payments (is that all?)
By the way, just in case you were wondering, I am not OCD - I’m CDO, which is OCD in alphabetic order ;o)
You Developers; Keep up the strong work, We love OpenEMR!