[Gnumed-devel] Billing as related to Germany

[Jim Busser]

I noticed a new page attached, to the bottom of the GNUmed wiki  
Billing page, a German topic

        
http://wiki.gnumed.de/bin/view/KBV_Schnittstellen/ZusammenarbeitMitAbrechnungssoftware

Google translation into English:

        
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwiki.gnumed.de%2Fbin%2Fview%2FKBV_Schnittstellen%2FZusammenarbeitMitAbrechnungssoftware

What seems desired from GNUmed are some functionalities possible  
already to some degree:

- person (who does not yet exist in GNUmed) is created in the  
accounting program... depending on the co-operation of the creators of  
the accounting program, it can be entirely possible for the accounting  
program to automatically (or at minimum, on user action) create an  
output file and/or otherwise communicate to GNUmed the need to check  
whether this patient exists, and if they do not yet exist create them,  
but if they do exist update them, via XML-PRC and GNUmed "slave mode".  
This would of course need a suitable "mask" to be defined mapping the  
correspondences of the data.

- GNUmed to perform any additional actions automatically, either in  
follow-up to an action above, or to some other within-GNUmed process  
--- I believe that this should to some extent be possible using an  
already-provided-for "hooks" framework in GNUmed

- there is a request to be able to use coding systems e.g. for  
diagnosis... this is provided for in the GNUmed data structure and  
perhaps even some classes but not yet implemented in the GI and a  
related challenge exists to obtain stable GPL-friendly sources of  
coding systems values

 - there is additionally some proposal (BillingProposal) on the wiki  
to be able to capture, within GNUmed, items that need to billed  
however what more than the need to bill *something* becomes arbitrary  
whether to capture the information inside GNUmed vs to notify the  
outside accounting system which can then rely upon as-yet undefined  
permissions to view/copy data from a GNUmed record.

Not being a German speaker or biller, I'd be interested how well the  
above captures what seems to be desired for Germany.