I recently had our front desk personal start entering the patient’s insurance number in the number field (for the “pub_id”) of the demographics page. The reason is because some of our patients are Workers Comp and have multiple claims. When browsing for a patient from the search screen, it was difficult to differentiate the claims per patient based on the “pid” displayed, When I imported our patient data from our Access DB, I imported patient ID into “pid”, “pub_id” and “id” of table “patient_data”. I do not foresee a problem with entering the insurance number for “pub_id” so as long as I maintain the original “pid”. Would others agree?
Yes, we have patients entered multiple times in demographics. We have Workers’ Compensation patients in our office. Only a few are entered multiple times though. In our old Access DB program, the only way to schedule or keep records for the patient with multiple Workers’ Compensation claims was to treat each claim as a separate patient. Otherwise, it was not known which claim the patient was in the office seeking treatment for that day. I imported the patient demographics from our Access system into OpenEMR and was careful to retain the patient_id’s.
For example, Patient Mike Test is a Workers Compensation patient with 3 different injuries ( claims ). He hurt his shoulder, neck, and hand. So he would have patient ID 1001, 1002, and 1003. Workers’ Comp patients are not allowed to come in for a doctor’s visit for all 3 claims on one day. Has to be separate days ( mandated by the BWC in the state). So only one follow up visit per claim on a single day. The BWC will only pay for one follow up visit per day regardless of the number of claims. If the patient was seen for all three claims in one day, we only get reimbursed for one visit.
So when searching for a patient in OpenEMR, Mike Test would display with ID’s 1001, 1002, 1003. Unless you drill down, it is not easy to know that ID 1001 is for his shoulder claim and ID 1002 is for his neck claim and so forth. That is the reason I thought placing the insurance number( in this case the BWC claim number) in pub_id would make it easier to differentiate the different claims. Is there a better way?
I guess you can do what you’re doing, but in general I think things will work better if you have only one demographics entry per patient. That’s how it was designed to work, anyway.
You might find it useful to create a separate "issue" for each WC claim. Issues are normally conditions, illnesses or injuries that might be associated with multiple visits. You could put the claim number in the issue title.
Of course there’s nothing currently in OpenEMR to enforce your one-claim-per-day rule.
I fully agree with you Rod. I was not thrilled about having multiple entries in demographics per patient. That was the only way to get it to work with the old system. I prefer to avoid redundancy all together. I will explore your suggestions. Thanks for your input on the topic.
By the way, I do need to put that BWC number on the prescription. The pharmacists will call if it is not on there. I have been looking at the code but have not seen where I can swap out "pid" for "pub_id" for the code that creates the patient PDF prescription. I have searched through the patient_file directory and library classes associated with prescription. Thanks.
I did not see the code that generates the data for the PDF prescription output. The pharmacies are requesting the BWC number to be on the prescription for our workers compensation patients. I began populating “pub_id” with the patient’s BWC number so this could be displayed on the patient search output. However, the prescriptions seem to print the “pid”.
Why does the prescription display the "pid" which is usually an internal number for a practice? Why not insurance/policy number?
Also, is it possible to have the globals.php file include settings for customizing prescription output?
The "pub_id" was intended to keep track of the patient chart number. The pid is the actual computer unique ID number for a given patient. This "pub_id" does not have to be unique and was intended to assist practices transitioning from paper charts to electronic charts. I have tried to keep the pub_id = pid but in practice this is quite difficult.
It seems that the prescription generating code should be using "pub_id" since it reflects the patients "paper chart number".
It would be nice to be able search by either pub_id or pid. It is actually easier to identify the pid than the pub_id but the find function only looks for pud_id.
Thanks for your input. Yes, I thought for sure that the prescription code would generate the pub_id number and was surprised that was not the case. Currently we are having our admin write the patient’s claim number on the script until I resolve the issue.
From the developer’s perspective the pid is the unique identifier so it is necessary for inclusion. The only place that I know of that takes the pub_id is the find function. They just tend not to think about it.
I like the idea of being able to customize what goes on the prescriptions.