Billing success or failure is a real issue. The reason is that "bills" can fail easily through no fault of the billing module or the PM. For a paper billing cycle, it is possible to have an impact printer mangle and eat half of the forms. The billing system cannot make the assumption that the printer is working. In an electronic enviroment the success or failure of billing is even more complex. For X12 there is always a response, in the X12 EDI, congraulating on success or asking for changes.
Eventually the billing system should be aware of the failures that it can be... but only the user can tell if there is a paper jam. What Tim is asking for is an intelligent middle ground. He want to be able to read the middle stages of the billing process because he knows that if a billing situation ever goes beyond the complexity that the billing system is capable of handling, he will be able to salvage the situation by having direct access to the files. Practically the files take up so little space that I will probably develop some method of saving them either permanently or for a very long time. The other good reason to do this is that having these files could become invaluable for billing disputes, the ugliest of which can easily end up in a lawsuit. I have, due to my security background, some experience trying to prove what happened when on a computer system. In fact the whole field of computer forensics is considered a subfield of internet security. The most critical component for proving issues regarding to computer forensics is to make sure that the logs are all time-synced. As a result, eventually the documentation of the FreeB project will include specific recommendations for using the time protcol in a medical environment. Also the billing system itself will make efforts to log in a fashion that is time aware. The ultimate goal being to have a billing system whose actions are verifiable in court! I would love to hear about Billing dispute stories, with an eye towards future billing system functionality! More generally, for those that have been close to billing disputes, what do you wish you had at your disposal that a billing system might be able to give you? In order to make this discussion more public, I am going to move it to a question on linuxmednews.com... please post your replied to this question there! Thanks, Fred Trotter On Mon, 2003-06-30 at 00:03, Tim Cook wrote: > On Sun, 2003-06-29 at 04:02, Karsten Hilbert wrote: > > A File > > >> that can be examined, edited and rebilled without having > > >> to back out a transaction in the EHR/PM system. > > Why would you even do that ? It's been submitted to billing > > and that's that. Whether you mark payed or resubmitted makes > > no difference. It's just another status change, I suppose ? > > Hi Karsten, > > The reason I would want to do that is because if there is an error in > the PM app data that caused the bill to fail I need to be able to see it > and correct it. > > If I have a file with the complete billing data then I have a way of > seeing exactly what happened without FreeB having to test for and > generate error messages for every possible exception. > > --Tim -- Fred Trotter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> synseer -- Fred Trotter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> SynSeer
