There are two ways to post board charges based on inpatients counted in the census:
- Manually, directly from the patient census
- Automatically based on definitions in the API
To enable the automatic census charges, you will need to log into the API and go to Hospital Interfaces & Jobs. The Census is found in the first section, Hospital Accounting Nightly Jobs.
Auto Post Census will check all the patients who are currently listed in the hospital census locations, and add the charges associated with their location + patient to the bill on the pre-defined schedule.
You can choose to have the charges post once a day (e.g. a single daily board fee) or you can have the charge run as frequently as once an hour, if you charge boarding fees on an hourly basis instead of a daily basis.
Warning
All charges associated with the patient + location will be charged each time the census runs, so if you charge a daily fee in addition to hourly charges, you will need to add the daily charge manually to the bill. The API cannot handle a single daily charge as well as hourly charges.
In the example below, the patient was admitted at 9:30 and a daily exam fee was added to the bill manually.
The census API ran once at 10AM and again at 12PM, and applied the automatic board charge to the open bill.
Remove patients from census if discharge date has passed, before posting new charges: The API can also check for patients that have been discharged, and automatically remove them from the census, if this process was not set up to happen automatically via the Episode Type.
Auto Start: This setting will attempt to turn the API functions back on in the event that your server is rebooted. Check with your networking team to see how frequently you reboot the servers, and whether enabling this is a good idea based on your internal server setup.