I’m having a really hard time understanding the meaning of “an encounter”…in various contexts it looks to me as if it’s the same as appointment. Yet, OpenEMR uses encounters and appointments. Is it a patient visit at a doctor’s office? Or maybe it has a broader sense. I’m not a native English speaker and I cannot match anything good to ‘encounter’ in Polish.
Let me just add that in the googledocs spreadsheet, encounter is in fact translated into an ‘appointment’ in PL, but many Polish equivalents there are incorrect, that is why I need to make sure.
Help would be much appreciated
In American English, an encounter is a visit, a patient has in a medical office. It can be with the physician, nurse, nurse practitioner, or physician’s assistant and generally there is a charge for the visit. A copy of the charge is given to the patient and this piece of paper is known as the encounter form.
An appointment is the scheduled block of time on the Calendar for the particular encounter.
Encounter and appointment are not used interchangeably because their denotations are different despite the terms being related. When a patient is given a 2" x 3.5" card for the time and date of the next visit, it is known as an appointment card, not as an encounter card.
In my very limited experience with Google Translate, some of the Latin translations were wrong or inaccurate. Cross referencing with more than one translator will yield a better result.
Obvious FSGL has the correct definition and explanation.
In my version as General Pgysician I would say:
An encounter is what happens during the face to face contact with the Doctor and all involved with that particular doctor like the lab technicians, radiology involvement etc… An appointment is something before the encounter, it should lead at least to an encounter or a future encounter.
Appointment is creating an schedule in advance by the patient before consulting the doctor.
In appointment when the status changes to arrived - the encounter will be created.
Thus, encounter is when patient consults the doctor.
