Re: [Gnumed-devel] Introducing myself and questions on billing/accounting

[Jim Busser]

On 2011-05-18, at 2:40 PM, Karsten Hilbert wrote:

> The billable item list itself would hopefully be
> synced/repopulated from somewhere else (say LSMB) where
> maintenance thereof is mandatory anyway (because actual
> bills are created from that).
> 
>>      2) data content specification
>>              patient identifiers
>>              practitioner identifiers
>>              service identifiers
> 
> Those three are the bare-bones minimum.
> 
>>              who is paying (who is to be billed)
> 
> This *could* be done inside the "other end", say LSMB, for
> the time being because, for bill generation, it would have
> to maintain some idea of bill receiver at any rate,
> regardless of whether that information is passed in from
> GNUmed or initially maintained within LSMB.

Workflow issues:

1) "billable items" should only "pass" from the EMR to the accounting system 
upon crossing a threshold of minimum required information (plus minus other 
sanity checks)

2) triggers for this "passage of information" should probably support each of

        user-based "pushing" to the interface
        e.g when a patient wants to pay up their account on their way out
        
        automated polling
        e.g. to collect those things which are ready but which did not require 
immediate pushing (or which the doctor overlooked to "push")

        CAVEATS:
        (i) each billable item should have one among defined statuses e.g.
                incomplete
                ready
                uploaded
                error
                deprecated / do not bill

        (ii) to avoid "missed" billings, some regular QI/review would be needed 
on the above

-- Jim