What happened to the Advanced Billing Module?

I see previous versions of OEMR refer to an Advanced Billing Module and there are 2012 YouTube videos of same by ZHHealthcare.
I am currently using v4.2.2 which lacks the functions shown in the Advanced Billing Module videos.
I will be upgrading to v5.0 shortly and am wondering if this version has these advanced billing functions.
If not, is there a way to have this added back in?

hi @ptalerico, pretty sure that was always a custom module offered by zh healthcare that never was contributed back to the community version

this mothballed project needs some sunlight and would hopefully incorporate what you’re looking for

Would be really nice to get OpenEMR’s billing up to par with proprietary options.
-brady

agreed, maybe @sunsetsystems has a strategy in mind @brady.miller?

I have done quite a bit for IPPF with the checkout module (i.e. non-insurance / POS) and related that will be contributed. Not sure how useful that will be in the U.S. though.

It would be good to define in some detail what will make OpenEMR billing “up to par”. Given that maybe there would be some sponsorship.

OEMR has several competing financial interests at this time, but it could likely sponsor something towards this endeavor to get things rolling (considering billing is vital and we have been talking about how it needs to be improved for almost a decade, it does seem like sponsorship will be needed to get this moving forward).

Agree with @sunsetsystems, that need to hone down on the specific requirements that are needed. There are several gap analyses in the link @stephenwaite posted above, so probably good idea to look through those and develop a composite list of modern day requirements.

does zh healthcare have a list of features that outperform the community version? ask and answer, zh features

thanks @sunsetsystems for promising improvements to the checkout and payment screen that could go along way with some of the usability issues, like payments entered with encounter id of zero and copays not posting to the ar_activity table

before we recreate this thread, https://sourceforge.net/p/openemr/discussion/202504/thread/ea6efc26/?page=0

a core feature that could be addressed is batch charges. there was a recent post on the forum asking about this, Billing multiple days of service

Hi Stephen,

When is this advanced billing module planned to rollout? How can we contribute to it?.

Regards,

hi @crlsgzmn, thanks for the offer, we should come up with a strategic plan first

After reading the pdf’s for the billing module I’m surprised that someone has not tried to tackle this project after all this time. The outline proposed works for small practices as well as medium and large. As a potential end-user of OpenEMR, the lack of functional billing makes me hesitate adoption of this system. Are there any open source billing software available that can be used?

hi @MFCmanager, OpenEMR has functional billing and some very nice features that go beyond even that but there is room for improvement :slight_smile:

Ok, it’s functional…:slight_smile: but I personally wouldn’t use it.

…So, what would you use?

I have to agree

Well, currently we are using MedInformatix. The whole system is ok. I like the billing portion but I don’t like paying more than $4000 a year for “support” that we don’t receive. I want to be in control of my system; that is why I am looking at OpenEMR. I don’t want to use a different software for billing. I looked at TotalMD for billing so maybe I can use that until someone works on the billing portion in OpenEMR.

I completely agree with you about paying for all the support no one never gets lol… That’s why I got openEMR as well. I absolutely love the billing portions of it. Needs some major tweaks but overall, it work. I never like paying for something I cannot own and can use at the same time which is why I told every company off I found what I needed.

Unfortunately, I cannot use it because I do not have a HIPPA compliant hosting server. Thought to hosting them myself! and then build a tiny sftp code in the clams portion of the app to submit my directly to claims to OA.

@Anthony_Porter why not use the AWS for hosting and compliance?