The Summary page for a patient provides access to "Patient Notes".
The History Page and Encounter Page shows the Patient Notes listed along with the encounters on the bottom part of the display, as if they were part of the encounters; evidently it matches them by date.
However Patient Notes are *not* part of encounters and cannot be entered while you are working on an encounter. I would think that that taking encouner-related notes would be a job for the associated encounter forms.
So do the Patient Notes as currently implemented make any sense? Are they there just because someone could not be bothered with encounter forms?
Patient Notes offers a location to include relevant patient information that is unrelated to the patient’s medical condition. Examples of information that may be included are outstanding balances, changing insurance information or patient requests for actions by the clinic.
In earlier versions of OpenEMR that integrated the EOB and A/R functionality of SQL-Ledger, the patient’s outstanding balance would appear in the Patient Notes section.
Other examples include notices that the patient will have a new employer and insurance informtion, but the insurance information will not be effective for 30-45 days or the patient’s name will be changing on a date in the future. Patient Notes may also be used to identify that a patient called requesting action from the office. For example if the patient will be seen by a different physician, and the patient requests that medical records be sent to the physician for use in the examination, Patient Notes can record the patient’s request, and that the request was fulfilled.
Obviously this isn’t what the patient notes section was originally designed for… but we’ve been using it like a “progress notes” section where we document phone calls, refills, etc… It’s worked well for that.
As noted by Emily, we use this primarily yo record all incoming patient telephone calls and responses to those calls. The pattient nots seciton would work better as a bulletin board.
I don’t think is is useful to have it appear in the encounters.
OK I have updated the list of encounters as follows:
* The column of patient notes is removed (patient notes otherwise remain in the system).
* The list now shows the actual encounter date instead of the date that the encounter was entered or last modified.
* This billing column is now a list of codes instead of a jumbled mass of text. You can mouse-over a code to see its description.
Also I have changed occurrences of the text "New Patient Encounter" to just "New Encounter" or Patient Encounter", as some people were understandably confused into thinking that it only applies to new patients.