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If you work in a traditional group practice, you may need to have a shared chart and combined billing for all practitioners treating the same patient. Because the process of sharing this information has the potential to compromise confidentiality, you should exercise caution when using of this feature. An important question to ask yourself from a HIPAA perspective is, "Does sharing information with this practitioner enhance health care delivery to this patient?" Also note that these features will not be available unless you are in a group practice.
Ensure that your group�s account manager for TherapyAppointment has given the clinicians permission to share charts within the group. They can accomplish this by logging into their account, going to the grey column of buttons and clicking on the preferences button. Click on the "group membership and privileges" section and check the box under "can share charts," then save the changes.
Each therapist wishing to share charts must first have that client entered into their own client database. Our system automates this process for you. If an Admin usually enters new client information for your group, a good place to start is from that Admin account. After clicking "New Patient" you will be given the option of creating a shared chart at the onset of treatment, and copying the client information into as many therapist accounts as is appropriate. It is important to enter as much information about the client as is known before copying the information to other accounts: information entered later must be entered into each practitioner's account individually.
Now that the demographic information has been entered, a shared chart can be created from the admin account. Select the practitioners whose notes should be shared. The system will search for a client with the same last name and birthdate in the other accounts; if that client is not found, a new chart will be created automatically.
Note that any chart which is shared with other clinicians will have a red �shared with __ other staff� indicator in the top right hand section of their information page. Hovering over this note will display more information.
If a share is created by an admin, the share must be completed that same day. The admin has a "license to share" that will expire at midnight, though clinical staff will have this license permanently.
Now let's discuss a different situation. Let's say that two therapists have already been charting independently on a client, and they realize that it would be in the client's best interest to coordinate care. The client has been advised of this, and agrees. Since the charts didn't start off being shared, the first step in combining these existing charts is to change the sharing status in each of the two accounts. You do this by clicking the "Edit Info" button, opening the section "Information that changes frequently" and changing the sharing permission status there.
Now that both therapists have given permission for the share, the charts can be combined, using the same "share charts" button. Note that this time, the software detected that the charts already existed in both accounts, so no new accounts will be created.
Now click the �view notes button�. You will see that each note now has an �author� listed next to the date of service for the note.
Now let�s take a look at our newly combined statement, If you click on the �statement� button, you will now have an option to �disallow� creation of a combined statement if you wish. Click to create the statement, and you will now see that all sessions with any of the practitioners in the group are combined into one statement and total.
Now, one final situation. Lets say that a client has announced that they no longer want what is revealed in individual sessions to be shared with other clinical staff. To stop sharing this information, edit the client information, and change the sharing status there. This will bread the share, and each chart will be independent once again.
We hope that our traditional groups and agencies will find this combined charts and billing feature helpful!