There was a correction to the patient balance computation in release 3.2.0 that somehow never made it into 4.0.0 and beyond. This is the balance that is displayed under Billing in the patient summary. A front office person typically uses this to ask for payment of the old balance when a patient arrives.
Currently it just presents charges less payments and adjustments. However this generally not what the patient owes. When a claim is out to insurance, the insurance is expected to pay or adjust what remains on it.
So I have corrected the computation to omit amounts out to insurance. Code may be seen here:
A global option can be done. But perhaps better to show both patient balance and total balance? Or patient balance and insurance balance? What do you think?
In terms of personal injury/auto claims, you would need to wait until you receive the EOB from the insurance company to determine the patient’s responsibity for charges submitted. My preference is to have a toggle in global options.
well I am going to throw my hat in the ring because I just had a conversation with a client office. They have a situation where the patient doesn’t have a balance but sent a check for $200. How do they show a credit in the system for the patient so that when he comes in for service that the co-pays are drawn against the credit?
Sherwin, there’s nothing special about a credit balance. It just shows as a negative number. You can use the Payments window to transfer some part of it from one encounter to another.
Hi.Rod
I was testing the payment…and found that if you select a patient and then go to payments, and do a pre payment, it doesnot reflect in the system…That payment is not found anywhere…can you please check this out
Let me explain the situation:
1. I create a patient in openemr
2. The patient wants to give a pre payment of suppose 200 dollars in cash
3. I opened the payment module and selected cash and check selfpay, but to my surprise i donot find prepay option there and only encounter payment is found
4. I have to select insurance, though the payment is not insurance based and there i get pre payment option…I select that
5. now there is a text box saying Prepayment and I put 200 in it and click generate invoice
6. It shows me a print preview…good
7. Now when I go to patient summary screen I find the payment widget saying balance = 0.00
8 this should not be the case
9. nex i create an encounter against the patient and bill the patient 150 dollars
10. I again move to payment module and see that it is not showing anything as prepaid amount.
11. I selected self pay and encounter payment.
12. there it is showing 150 as the amount billed but no pre paid amount
13. after i fill in 150 in the payment box, it shows 150 paid and generated the invoice.
14. I went to patient summary screen and it shows that the balace is 0.00
15. went to EOB screen and i couldnt find any pre payment amount against the patient
16. in the batch payment module, I searched for the patient payment and found that in pre payment category, there is a 200 dollar registered but pay status is showing unapplied.
16. My query is why is it not showing in payment module after pre payment from there
17. How to handle the pre payment…is anything wrong?
Arnab, please ask ZH to comment on that. I’m pretty sure they are the ones who put in the prepayment feature. Looks like it’s creating an ar_activity table entry with the encounter set to 0 (like a “payment on account” thing), but don’t know what if anything they have also added to follow up on that.
What we have done is to go to billing/eob search and select the patient and just type it into the notes box. It then shows up above the balance in demographics as a note. Something like “patient has a credit of $20.” Not real elegant but functional.Then when you see the patient you can just adjust off their $20 copay on the next visit and erase the note. This has been kind of common since insurance plans have been kind of spotty about honoring the new guidelines of not charging copayments or deductibles for routine preventive care.
