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

[Chris Travers]

On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 12:26 AM, Jim Busser <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 2011-05-19, at 11:18 PM, Sebastian Hilbert wrote:
>
>> There could be
>> a) a plugin where one would manually enter billables (e.g. fetching billable
>> items from LSMB) sending it off to LSMB
>
> Some SQL musings which Karsten had posted (appended below) it sounds like an 
> "inventory" table
>
>                bill.billable_item
>
> might better live in LSMB to serve as the
>
>                superset / inventory of "things-which-can-be-billed"
>
> But if it does live in LSMB, what would be the access control for records in 
> that table? IOW when user Doctor Leonard McCoy wishes to instantiate a draft 
> billing item (later to be passed to LSMB) how will the doctor --- or would it 
> be GNUmed on behalf of the doctor? ---  obtain permission from LSMB to read 
> the reference table? Would some GNUmed EMR generic account perform the query 
> on behalf of the doctor, and pass the results to the doctor? Or would LSMB 
> make such reading of reference tables unrestricted?


The current discussion I think is assuming that LSMB is living in a
different database on Pgsql for privacy reasons.  In this case, GNUmed
would need to see the data as a relation in its own database.  How
this is done is an implementation detail that could be worked out a
number of different ways:

1)  replicated table (perhaps using something like SLONY or just a
simple synchronization script that might run periodically)
2)  a view to an external data source using dblink or DBI-link.  They
could even be installed in different schemata and views/permissions
used to restrict access.

the point is that from the application perspective, these are
separate, and I think GNUmed would only have read-only access to the
definitions of billable items.

>
> From the doctor's perspective then, when initiating a billing from inside an 
> encounter, the widget would reference a GNUmed table
>
>        bill.billable_encounter_types
>
> to then help to filter --- from LSMB --- a list or array of candidate 
> "things-which-can-be-billed" thereby informing the creation of one or more 
> GNUmed

That can be done using existing functionality in LSMB if partsgroups
are not otherwise needed.
>
>        bill.billed_item
>
> records, which can be later approved and passed to LSMB?

Right.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers