hi…
How can we follow up a patient in openemr? Suppose a patient came with a certain complaint and i ask the patient for a follow up visit after 2 weeks and bill the patient after giving certain medication for the current encounter. After 2 weeks the patient arrives and now we open the previous encounter where the details of the disease process was present. I have to create a new encounter to have a follow up but that should not be the case…i should be able to follow up the patient in the same encounter and able to bill the patient too. This is not possible. for billing, i have to create a new encounter. Can this be solved???
I believe the concept of encounters was designed to record each visit as distinct regardless of whether the issue being addressed is peculiar to the encounter or a continuation of previous encounters.
Though this arrangement may have its shortcomings, I believe it has more advantages and should be left that way -at least as default…
If you elect to edit previous encounters with updated information on the current state of the medical condition, it will create confusion as each encounter is allocated a date (usually of first visit), provider (second visit could be under a different provider), reason etc. The encounter list information will be inaccurate/confusing if you attempt to fit multiple encounters into one.
Of course once billing is done, editing of billing info is not possible unless you undo the checkout in which case-at least in my experience- you lose previous billing info for the visit you have uncheckedout.
In fact we have been advocating for locking of encounter notes after a visit in a similar way to billing in order to discourage later editing.
OpenEMR partially solves your issue by allowing you to monitor “Medical problems” or “Issues” These issues can be linked to multiple visits such that it clearly shows what visits addressed a certain problem therefore indicating that subsequent visits after first linked to the problem were follow-up visits. The problems can be inactivated once they cease to exist. please check out this functionality (if you haven’t already) and see if it at least partially sorts you out.