Charge Questions/Answers

Q: How does the Free Text Referring Physician field work within the Encounter?

A: When a provider selects a consult code and they are unable to find the referring physician they can type in the search box, click the "misc" button and click "ok". This adds what the provider entered in the search box as a free text referring physician. When the provider submits the charge a "Mng Chg Edits" task is created for the Charge Edits Team. When the Charge Edits team opens the task it takes them to the encounter where there is the red frowny face that tells them there is a free text referring physician. They then research and add the referring physician in Practice Management System if necessary, then go into the EHR and select the now selectable referrring physician and click submit.

• Please note this is an Enterprise Preference and can be set under the Charge Admin tab. Many organizations choose to set this preference to NO due to billing issues that may arise if the correct referring provider is not indicated on the encounter.

Q: When the front desk arrives an appointment in error, then subsequently cancels the same appointment in the Practice Management system, what happens to the "Submit Enc Form" task?

A: Once the appointment is cancelled in the Practice Management system the task should resolve itself.

Q: I realize the $ in the daily schedule means the charge was submitted, & in the clinical desktop, there is a blue check mark that means the charge was submitted to our practice mgmt system...is it possible to have the blue check mark show on daily schedule?

A: I’m not aware of any method by which you could get the blue check mark to show on the daily schedule unfortunately. My suggestion would be to enter a case with Support Force. It might be that this is billable customization work that Allscripts would do for your organization. However, my initial thought is that it is not.

Q: Can the date of service be a header in the task view? Currently, you can't see the date of encounter until you click on a task and view the ""task about"" box at the bottom left of the screen. Date of service as a header would save a HUGE amount of time!!!

A: I’ve never seen any documentation that would indicate DOS could be utilized as one of the headers in the task view. However, the created on date, should be the date that the appointment was arrived at least for the “Submit Enc Form” tasks. Of course, once those initial tasks are resolved by your providers and a “Review Enc Form” or “Mng Chg Edits” task is kicked off, that logic will no longer be applicable. I completely agree it would make back office workflows much smoother if that DOS info was contained in the task. It’s as if development just stopped one step shy of a great idea. However, if you’ve got someone in your organization that’s really handy with SQL and knows the DB tables, it may be that a custom report would fit your needs better than a task list anyway. The drawback there would be that you would have to manually pull each of those patients into context.