[Gnumed-devel] Re: Billing revisited

[Jim Busser]

I see there now exists in v11 the beginnings of a bill schema

	http://salaam.homeunix.com/~ncq/gnumed/schema/gnumed_v11/gnumed- 
schema.html#bill.schema

Comparing to my posting of "Billing revisited" of 5-Mar-09 @10:46 the  
following are provided for although under different names:

        key to encounter (default current encounter)
        date time (default date time of encounter, needs to be modifiable)
        clinician (default clinician from the encounter)
        site of care (default keyed encounter's location type)
        status (default incomplete;approved;transferred)

the following are not. We maybe need to resolve whether to create and  
maintain, in the items table, fields that are so granular as currency  
and amounts. I suggest not, since amounts per-fee-code will live in  
reference tables and there exist further complexities like the  
numbers of units to bill, duration of visit etc.

It was for this reason I was thinking that a comment to the billing  
clerk "bill 3 x code" would suffice, and any more complexity desired  
to be stored within the item could be achieved as an abstraction in  
data_formatted much like an HL7 message that is internally delimited  
with "|" and "^":

        billable (default "true"; false; null)
        key to patient (default current patient)
        alt_clinician (default current user clinician)
        data_narrative (free text vs blob?)
        data_formatted (free text)
        comment (free text to guide the billing clerk)

Can we add a table
        bill_feecodes
having fields:
        fee_key (auto-increment)
        fee_code (free text)
        fee_description (free text)