Intrim Bill - hmislk/hmis GitHub Wiki
An interim hospital bill is a partial or preliminary bill given during a patient's hospital stay, providing an indication of charges incurred so far, while the final bill is issued after discharge and processing of claims.
Under the section "Patient Details" all the information about the selected BHT will be displayed.
Under the section "Fees and Details" the different types of fees accumulated by the patient during their stay will be displayed, as a set of tabs:
- Room Charges
- Timed Service Charges
- Service and Investigation Charges
- Medicine and Consumable Charges
- Outside Charges
- Professional Fees
- Assistant Charges
- Deposits & Payments
- Post Final Payment
Each tab has its own Excel and PDF export button, so any tab's figures can be downloaded independently for record-keeping or sharing outside the system.
The old standalone "Store Issue" tab has been removed — stores are no longer a separate issuing pathway from Pharmacy, so store-issued medicine now shows up under the Store sub-tab inside Medicine and Consumable Charges (see below), not as its own top-level tab.
Medicine and Consumable Charges — per-department totals
When the config 'Medicine, Sort by the type of department that issued it.' is enabled, this tab splits medicine issues into department sub-tabs (ETU, Pharmacy, Inward, Theatre, Store, Inventory). Each sub-tab now shows a Total footer row summing its own bills, and the tab as a whole shows an overall Total Medicine Issue figure summing across every department:
In the section under "Summary" Total Charges, Amount Paid By Patient an the Due amount will be displayed.
In the section "Discharge" you can discharge a patient or cancel the discharge. The discharge time will be displayed here.
You can select "Recalculate" to calculate the charges that will be displayed under the section "Charges"
Running Timed Services Are Counted in the Balance at Their Live Amount
A timed service that has been started but not yet stopped (its Stopped Time is still blank) keeps accruing charge for every minute it runs. On the Interim Bill, that running charge is now calculated as if the service ended at the moment you open or Recalculate the bill — and it is included in the charge-type total, the Total Charges, and the Due amount, not only in the Timed Service Charges tab.
Previously the tab showed the up-to-the-minute figure but the Summary totals and the patient balance used only the amount the service was priced at when it was first added, so the two disagreed and the balance under-stated what the patient actually owed for a long-running service (issue #23607 / #23606).
A still-running timed service (Stopped Time blank) shows the same live amount in the Timed Service Charges tab and in the Oxygen Charges row of the Charges grid, and that amount is carried into Total Charges and Due. Clicking Recalculate a few minutes later shows the figure grown by the additional elapsed time.
This is a display-time calculation only — opening or recalculating the Interim Bill does not stop the service or write the interim amount back. The service stays running; its Stopped Time is set (and the amount frozen) only when someone stops it from the Add Timed Services page, or when the patient is discharged. Nursing discharge still cannot be completed while any timed service is still running — stop them first.
Why the Interim Bill Won't Match the Final Bill While the Patient Is Still Admitted
The Interim Bill is a running snapshot as of the moment you open or Recalculate it, not a preview of the eventual Final Bill. While the patient is still admitted, it will normally read lower than the Final Bill turns out to be, for three separate reasons:
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Room Charges keep growing. The Room Charges tab (and the "Room Charges" figure quoted elsewhere on the Interim Bill) is not just the room rate — it's the sum of several duration-based components calculated together: Room Charge, Maintenance Charge, Administration Charge, MO Charge, Nursing Charge, Linen Charge, and Medical Care Charge. Several of these (e.g. Administration Charge, Maintenance Charge) are calculated per elapsed day/duration bracket, using the discharge time if the patient has already been discharged, or the current time if the patient is still admitted. So this figure keeps increasing the longer the patient stays, and changes every time you reopen or Recalculate the bill.
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Running Timed Services keep growing. As described above, any timed service that hasn't been stopped yet is priced as if it ended right now — so its charge, and everything it feeds into (Total Charges, Due), also keeps climbing until someone stops it or the patient is discharged.
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Some charges may simply not have been entered yet. Services, investigations, medicine issues, professional fees, or outside charges that hadn't been billed/posted at the moment the Interim Bill was generated obviously can't appear on it — they show up later once billed, and then appear on the Final Bill. This isn't a calculation quirk like the first two; it's just that the Interim Bill can only ever total up what has been entered into the system so far.
Practical effect: comparing an Interim Bill printed/viewed before discharge against the Final Bill printed after discharge will very often show the Final Bill as higher — even with nothing done wrong and no charge type silently "added." The gap is the combination of (1) and (2) continuing to accrue, plus (3) any charges posted in the meantime.
If you need the Interim Bill to match the Final Bill exactly: discharge the patient first (see Inpatient Room Discharge), make sure every charge for the stay has actually been entered/billed, and only then view/print the Interim Bill. Once discharged, the duration-based components (Room Charges, and any still-running timed service once stopped) are calculated using the same fixed discharge time as the Final Bill, so the figures will agree — provided nothing further gets billed to the encounter afterwards. An Interim Bill taken while the patient is still admitted, or before all charges are posted, should be treated as an estimate as of that moment, not a fixed figure to reconcile against the eventual Final Bill.
Outside Charges on the Printed Interim Bill
When an Outside Charge has been added to the admission, the printed/reprinted Interim Bill now lists it by its own item name, instead of only showing the shared charge category it belongs to (e.g. "Instrument Charges").
For example, if an Outside Charge for a "Harmonic Machine" was added under the Instrument Charges category, the Interim Bill print now shows a line reading "Harmonic Machine" with its amount, rather than a generic "Instrument Charges" line that gave no indication of what was actually charged:
If a charge category has both regular service charges and an Outside Charge in it, the category line shows only its regular service total, and the Outside Charge item appears as its own separate line below — so nothing is counted twice, and every amount on the bill is traceable to what it's actually for.
This applies to both the Interim Bill print (from the Interim Bill page) and the Interim Bill reprint (from Interim Bill Search).
Returned / Cancelled Services and Investigations Stay Visible
Previously, once a Service or Investigation bill was fully returned or cancelled, the item disappeared entirely from the Service and Investigation Charges tab, leaving no trace that it had ever been billed.
It now stays on the list. Each row shows three separate counts — Billed Count, Returned / Cancelled, and Net Count — plus a Status badge:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Active (green) | Nothing returned or cancelled; the full billed quantity still stands |
| Partially Returned / Cancelled (amber) | Part of the billed quantity was returned or cancelled; the rest is still billed |
| Fully Returned / Cancelled (red) | The whole billed quantity has been returned or cancelled; Net Count is 0 |
The Gross / Discount / Service Charge / Net / VAT figures on the row are the net amounts (billed minus returned/cancelled), so a fully returned item reads as 0.00 across the money columns while still showing what was originally billed. The View Bill Items button remains available on these rows so the underlying bills and their returns can still be opened.
Returned Medicines Are Deducted From the Medicine Total
When medicines that were issued to an inpatient are returned (from the Medicine Issue return workflow), the returned value is now correctly subtracted from the relevant Medicine charge line under "Charges" — e.g. "Theatre Medicine", "Inward Medicine", or the plain "Medicine" line, depending on which department issued it.
The return itself is still recorded and printable as its own "Return Bill" from the Medicine Issue tab, so the individual returned item and its value remain fully traceable — only the Medicine category total shown here is the net (issued minus returned) figure.
This now also covers the porter-mediated Ward Return to Pharmacy workflow (medicines received onto the ward via a pharmacy request, then sent back to the pharmacy by a porter) — previously this return's value was recorded but never subtracted anywhere, so it silently never reduced the Medicine total:
Known limitation: when
'Medicine, Sort by the type of department that issued it.'is enabled, the department sub-tab totals (ETU/Pharmacy/Inward/Theatre/Store/Inventory) are correctly net overall, but a ward return is bucketed under the returning department (Inward) rather than the issuing department (Pharmacy) — so the Inward sub-tab's per-bill list can show a higher sum than its own net total line, with the difference sitting in the Pharmacy sub-tab instead. The Total Medicine Issue figure at the top of the tab, and the plain "Medicine"/department total lines in the Charges panel, are unaffected and always correctly net. Also, a porter-flow return bill does not yet appear as its own row in the per-bill Medicine Issue list (it's tracked differently from the older direct-issue/request return bills) — only the total reflects it.