Price Levels as Percentage

jwynveen · July 16, 2019, 1:09pm

I am setting up a new installation and the practice would like to have overall price levels that give specific percent-based discounts. Based on where patients may have been referred from, they have different discount percents that apply to a whole invoice and not just individual service codes.

I know that price levels work by adding more price fields to each service code, but that becomes a hassle if they later need to add a new price level. They (or I) would have to go and edit every single code to calculate the new price at that price level. Is there a way to have a price level work as a percentage? I thought I remember seeing that in the Administration settings somewhere, but I can’t find it now.

I’ve also thought of creating a service code that is just called Discount or something like that, but I’m not able to enter that as a percentage. I can enter a negative value, but that is read as a monetary value.

Any ideas of how to do overall (invoice level) percent-based discounts?

stephenwaite · July 16, 2019, 2:00pm

hi @jwynveen, it would require some coding if you’re not using insurance you could try modifying the payments script and add a discount button

jwynveen · July 18, 2019, 11:21am

Is there a way I could use the insurance feature for this? I can’t find documentation on how insurance works within OpenEMR. I would love to be able to setup each insurance company to just give a flat XX% discount. I have a feeling that’s not how the insurance feature actually works though based on my quick test.

If I need to modify coding, I’m comfortable doing that, but could you give me direction of where to start? I’m an experienced programmer but am new to OpenEMR, so I just need to know where to start looking.

stephenwaite · July 18, 2019, 1:03pm

it maybe a little tedious but how about looking at price levels, it’s a dropdown on the fee sheet, so you could set it up under Admin->Lists->Price Level and then have an entry for each code under Admin->Codes

for a more elegant solution you could look at the code in openemr/FeeSheetHtml.class.php at master · openemr/openemr · GitHub

jwynveen · July 18, 2019, 1:09pm

I think the price level would be a nice solution. However, it works on monetary values for each code. Is there a way to modify that to work as a percentage?

stephenwaite · July 18, 2019, 1:14pm

github.com

openemr/openemr/blob/master/interface/forms/fee_sheet/new.php#L1219-L1234


    $fs->addServiceLineItem(array(
    'codetype'    => $iter['code_type'],
    'code'        => trim($iter['code']),
    'revenue_code'    => $revenue_code,
    'modifier'    => trim($iter["mod"]),
    'ndc_info'    => $ndc_info,
    'auth'        => $iter['auth'],
    'del'         => $iter['del'],
    'units'       => $units,
    'fee'         => $fee,
    'justify'     => $iter['justify'],
    'provider_id' => $iter['provid'],
    'notecodes'   => $iter['notecodes'],
    'pricelevel'  => $iter['pricelevel'],
    ));
}

jwynveen · July 18, 2019, 1:59pm

This is great. Thank you! I think I’m getting an idea of how to do this.

Since those look like core files and I’d prefer not to change them and cause conflicts with future updates, is there a way to override that FeeSheetHtml class and just modify that genPriceLevelSelect function?

stephenwaite · July 18, 2019, 2:11pm

bet if you can come up with an approach that might work for the project we can incorporate it into the codebase, openemr/CONTRIBUTING.md at master · openemr/openemr · GitHub

jwynveen · July 22, 2019, 3:35pm

Great! I think what I just did might work for others as well. Might not be the most elegant solution, so I’m open to suggestions that fit better within the overall architecture. For now, this seems to fit my needs: https://github.com/openemr/openemr/pull/2577

stephenwaite · July 22, 2019, 6:01pm

form follows function will test out