I thought that adding an issue (with a diagnosis) to an encounter for populate the fee sheet with that code. But it turns out that is not the case. Is there an automated way to add codes to the fee sheet based on what issues are associated to the encounter from the patient?
If not, anyone work on such a linkage? If not, then it seems we will have to come up with something. Currently a client of ours is using the fee sheet list to add the appropriate codes as a “quick add” but for each patient! It’s crazy!
The bad thing is the way the fee sheet lists writes data to the sql database is that it delets the whole table and then re-writes it! There have been instance where it doesn’t finish the write process and inpatient users click to go somewhere else and they end up with a half fee sheet list…
I also see this as a potential problem when we switch our billing to OpenEMR. We are currently using EZ-Claim for our billing claim generation and one thing I like about it is that when you set up a patient for the first time you can add the diagnosis codes associated with that patient ( item 21 of the HCFA 1500). Then each time that patient comes in for a visit, there is no need to keep entering the diagnosis codes - they are stored in the database. Most of our patients come in once a month so it would be pain staking to have to enter the diagnosis code again and again let alone for all patients on any given date of service. I am curious to know how many people are billing with OpenEMR and how they got around this problem.
My understanding is that the issues area is for entering their history and not the current diagnosis. In this case, as has been explained by the both of you, the best way to approach it is to write a functionality in the fee sheet to clone the last visit. We have written this function for the practices that we support: an option is given to clone any on the previous visits or the immediate past visit.   I am sure the CAMOS also has a cloning function.Â
We encountered the same problem and physician wanted to make it in less clicks and less number of steps to complete the whole encounter thing.
1. For issues :
Ofcourse it is meant for historical data. But it can store current data as well, coz this maintains diagnosis record for each patient which is actually an imp feature.
Current encounter can be related to n issues. Coding can be done on limited only. probably thats the concept.
Physician -you can add issues, relate to current current encounter and can be automatically called in the fee sheet thru the program.
Biller - Once the fee sheet is received, only those that are to be kept for billing can be saved.
Similarly for other forms, you can have templates automated ones for cc/hpi, soap etc so that physician just requires to enter very minimal inputs.
We r currently busy working on claim generation and lot of changes on our front for openemr physicians requirement for hospitals and offices.
once this is smooth, we cna get actively involved.
Thanks
sim.
So placing the current diagnosis codes to be used for billing in the “Medical Problems” (Issues) area is not recommended?
I noticed that EZ-Claim has 4 diagnosis code columns in their patient data table to correspond to box 21 on the CMS1500. A work around could be to utilize 4 custom fields in the patient_data table of OpenEMR and modify the fee sheet to pull the codes from there.  Thoughts?