Documenting Telephone Calls

The EMR Glossary explains a number of EMR specific terms.

Summary

Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine Provider Charting provides an efficient way to log phone calls. Typically, a visit must be logged by the front desk staff before the provider can see it. For telephone calls, the provider can quickly log the visit and enter the required information.

  1. From the Home Nav Bar, click Check-In

  2. Search for and select the patient. Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine will create the visit record and display it on the [Enter Patient Visit] window. The visit category for telephone calls (see below) will already be selected.

  3. Once a patient is selected, click Ok and the Log Visit or Encounter window will display:

    Select "New Telephone Call"
  4. The Enter Visit window will display with the Visit category preselected as Phone. A number of other fields are pre-filled for a telephone encounter.

  5. If you are using the EMR, click EMR Charting to display the [Generate Patient EMR Charting Note] window.

  6. Generate the charting note.

When you reach the [Generate Patient EMR Charting Note] window, Patient Type will already be set to Telephone Call. The CPT codes for telephone calls will be displayed below the documentation requirements:

When you are finished with the charting note, and click Code E/M to add the appropriate E/M CPT code to the visit, the list of CPT codes available will be limited to the appropriate ones.

Telephone Call Setup

Two setup tasks are required for telephone calls. If your clinic has only recently begun using Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine, these were probably done during your system setup. If you were using Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine before the EMR was available, you may need to do these manually.

  • Add a visit category specific to phone calls. Read Set Up Visit Categories to learn how. We suggest that you create a visit category with a short code like "TELE" and a description such as "Telemedicine". The Result Type must be Telephone Call.

  • Enter the three CPT codes seen above for billing telephone calls. You will also need to enter a medical activity code for each. Read CPT Codes Overview to learn how to enter CPT Codes.

Reports

By default, the Visits Analysis Report does not include telephone calls. A box can be checked which will include them. It then becomes possible to run a report which lists only telephone calls. This is done be setting the first Select By box to Visit Category, then selecting the visit category for telephone calls in the Selecting field which follows it.