Healthcare Workflow

ERPNext
1

Hi all,

Brand new to ERPNext and only just starting to get to grips with the different workflows from what I’m used to, although I am really liking it so far.
I’m not sure if this is the best category for this, so please feel free to move/DM me with the correct place.

For a bit of context, I came across ERPNext whilst looking for a private medical practice management system for a business I work for, they are current using OpenEMR, but it has its drawbacks and is very US centric. I have also previously attempted to write my own system, which whilst fully functional, I felt it didn’t have the peer code review required for such a system and wasn’t comfortable putting it into production.

The bulk of my question I suspect stems from not having a full understanding of the ERPNext workflow yet, I may well have missed something obvious.

So far I’ve managed to register a patient, add pre-existing conditions, add a physician, register a schedule, book an appointment, perform the appointment (consultation), and I’ve just about figured out how to charge and record payment, although this feels a tad clunky for our use case.

The main problem I’ve had so far is that the appointments at this practice are of variable length, a “standard” appointment is 20 mins, but some patients only require 10 mins, whereas new patients require 30 for example, or at extremes, require over an hour. I can’t see any way to schedule this and then book the varying lengths, is this just something I’m missing, or do you have to used fixed length slots?
If a variable calendar approach isn’t currently available, and is something the community would like, I would be happy to contribute the storage and scheduling system I already from my own attempts, I just didn’t want to port it all across if it already exists.

Finally, when it comes to the patient paying for their treatment, is there a better workflow than raising an invoice then registering a payment against that invoice? Ideally whatever we do should support any form of payment (card, cash, cheque etc), and should be capable of producing an end of day report with a breakdown of each payment method.

I realise I’ve asked quite a lot there, but I’m really keen to move to ERPNext as I can see a lot of potential with another upcoming project I have.

2

Hi. Not sure if you have gone through this. It may help you with the queries.
https://erpnext.org/docs/user/manual/en/healthcare/physician_schedule

3

I’ve been through all the docs and understand how the fixed length schedule works, but I’m wondering if there is a way to do variable length appointments. The practice that I’m working with requires a bit more flexibility than this offers, I have the models and logic required to implement, but I was wondering if there was a specific reason why this doesn’t exist that I’ve missed.

4

Hi @tomtom5152,
Appointments with variable duration is a feature which is already merged to develop branch in a recent PR. It should be available in the master branch pretty soon.
You can update the duration field in the appoinment to acheive this, the remaining time of the slot will show in availability check, however note that appointments with duration longer than the slots are ignored. Please raise a github issue if you think this feature would help.

We are working on redesigning the invoicing workflows and on Clinical Procedures. Consider joining the healthcare volunteers gitter channel here.

Thanks,
Ranjith

2 Likes
5

@tomtom5152
When raising an invoice you can accept Cash, CC, Paypal, Bank Transfer etc or a combination of these payment methods. You can define any billable item as a Service, Product, Lab Test or what ever. You can also accept either part or full payment at that time.
It would be great to have another developer focused on healthcare.
Welcome :slight_smile:

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@Ranjith I managed to find that by doing a bench switch-to-develop to see what the current state of affairs is. This looks exactly like what I’m after, but there is still soem work to be done on it. I’ve already joined the gitter and will look into things like setting a default duration based on service unit/appointment type (unsure of the best place for this at present).

@System19 having now seen the tick box for POS on the sales invoice screen, that looks exactly like what I need. The final step is to get an end of day report with totals for different payments methods etc, but that runs the risk of going off topic here.

As a more general point, one concept I’m used to with OpenEMR is the idea of forms for each encounter (consultation). For example we have a SOAP form (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan), would these just be added as doctypes with a table field added to the consultation type. Again I’ll happily contribute a few sample forms back (probably starting with SOAP) if this doesn’t conflict with a workflow I haven’t yet understood.

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Hi- hoping you can guide us. We upgraded to ERPNEXT version 11.1.4, - do we need to do anything else to get all the latest healthcare modules?

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you need to update the version regularly to get latest features