Encounter

An Encounter is created, when a patient spends billable time with a provider. The TFM Encounter is the recording of the meeting between the patient and the provider. Therefore, every encounter must identify a patient, a provider and the date of the encounter. The TFM encounter also captures Encounter Details, the procedure(s), the claim(s) and the payment(s) that are associated with an Encounter.

TFM uses two encounter dialogs (Details Edit and Summary) to manage the encounter information.

Encounter Details Edit

The Encounter Edit dialog is used to capture the details about the encounter. The details of this dialog are fully discussed in the next chapter.

Encounter Summary

The Encounter Summary dialog is useful for several reasons. The dialog provides:

• mechanisms for entering related details like procedures, claims and patient payments
• display summaries of the detail that have already been entered (i.e. procedure list, claim list, payer payment list and patient account history)
• display totals of amounts in the lists
• indicates if the encounter is balanced (balanced means all procedures of all claims have been paid by the payers and the remainder of the charges has been debited from the patient account.)
• mechanism for patient to pay for the encounter
• mechanism for generating a report of all the information related to the encounter

The details of this dialog are fully discussed in a following chapter.