Patient Payment & New Medicare Rules

OpenEMR Development
1

I was asked this question.

I was wondering if you could make so that when a patient payment is applied to a date of service that it does not pull to the encounter that is being billed to the insurance?

The reason I ask is, if a Medicare patient (for example) pays us 30.00 for today’s date of service but Medicare states that they only owed us 27.00 then Medicare will factor in the 3.00 that the patient overpaid us for and reduce their payment to Dr. H for the 3.00 and then send the patient a refund check from Medicare. This really confuses the patients and makes them question the girls at the window trying to collect the patient’s money. Then there is the chance that that 3.00 extra dollars should have been applied on a balance for a previous balance and now we have to try and explain to the patient why they still owe us an extra 3.00 that they have already paid. This is really making a mess over all especially during deductible season!

Has this situation been addressed by someone?

@stephenwaite @visolveemr @brady.miller

2

hi @juggernautsei, pretty sure @sjpadgett spiffed up the Fees->payments screen so that copays will be posted against the correct encounter.

Just tested on https://eight.openemr.io/a/openemr/interface/login/login.php?site=default

3

Thanks @stephenwaite,

@sjpadgett could you let me know if the work you have done fits this situation when you get a chance.

Thanks!

4

Hey Guy’s, You can post to a previous encounter say -3.00 where you will get an alert informing posting against old encounter but will still post against that encounter’s DOS. I just think that the patient credit should be done in posting when the debit comes in on the next Medicare payment against the patient’s reimbursement(charge back).
This was fixed sometime before 5.0.1 release.

5

@sjpadgett thanks for the feedback.
It will help to guide how we mod this section.