[Gnumed-devel] GNUmed future billing concepts 'invoicing' and 'billed'

[Busser, Jim]

Presently, 'invoicing' involves

- selecting items within the current patient only, and

- actioning to 'invoice selected items'

which requires the existence of an address to which to 'address' the invoice.

Some thoughts:

1. A 'Select all' button, positioned between 'Remove' and 'invoice selected 
items' might be helpful

2. Does the constraint of requiring an address risk to reflect overly-rigid 
thinking? Scenarios:


1. I have a patient who does possess a stable address, however she reports that 
her step brother had tried to have her killed and so does not wish her address 
to be on record. She has provided me her email address and her cel phone 
address. If I do need to invoice her, I can arrange for her to pick it up, or I 
can email it to her.

It seems to me that users should be permitted to generate an invoice without a 
street address. Of course, the user should be helpfully warned and should have 
to occur that they actually wish to do this.

2. I have had patients who live outdoors, or in shelters. A few of them would 
be willing to pay something, when they can afford it. Others may be in a 
position where some other charitable agency is willing to cover some or all of 
their charges. This presents two scenarios:

(a) same as in (1) -- that it may be relevant to print an invoice without 
requirement for an address, or

(b) it may be helpful to be able to designate, within GNUmed, some responsible 
party (payor) other than the patient. This can be a family member, or a friend 
who exists in GNUmed, or it could be a non-person such as an organization, such 
as an insurer


GNUmed-future might therefore benefit from:

- in Demographics plugin, a new tab 'Payers' functioning somewhat like names 
and addresses:
        - support to add one or more items
        - support to designate one among them the 'active' value
        - support for a comment field

- a link table 'person2payer'

- a trigger added to dem.identity which auto-appends a self-record to 
'person2payer'

- the ability to designate, within the Demographics > Payers tab and inside the 
list of Payers, a value which can represent the pk of a person *or* the pk of 
an org

- in the Billing plugin GUI, to insert and display at bottom left the patient's 
default Payer (borrowing space from the Comment), and providing the 
functionality to be able to alter or redesignate the payer

- the capacity for

        Invoice

to have more than one meaning. In the case where the responsible payer is a 
person, then billings can be attached to a bill, and a paper invoice generated. 
 However when the payer is an org, it would be helpful of a click on

        Invoice

would instead approve the selected item(s) to be handled conditionally as 
follows:

- if there is no instruction otherwise (i.e. in the situation of a default), a 
paper invoice would be directed to the

        organization
        org contact person
        org address

because some patients might own a business, or be incorporated, or because even 
an insurance company may require some kind of original invoice.

*** HOWEVER *** if it is possible, in the case of one or more orgs, that they 
can receive multi-patient billings electronically, then the org can be 
configured as to which script or service or daemon is to be used, and the 
effect of "Invoice" will be to add the selected billings to whatever is the 
next batch applicable for the script or service or daemon.

-- Jim