The main difference between the EpisodeOfCare and the Meeting is that the Meeting records the details of an activity directly related to the patient. In the field of healthcare, an encounter is a single interaction or visit between a patient and a healthcare professional, while a healthcare episode is a grouping of one or more encounters related to a specific illness or treatment, which usually last for a period of time. A hospital account is used to bill and financially track services provided during a care episode. In health informatics, it is important to understand the concept of episodes of attention versus episodes of encounters. A meeting is a unique event where care is provided.
Individual office visits, emergency room visits, chemotherapy appointments, and C-sections are all encounters. An episode of attention is a group of more than one encounter. A pregnancy is an episode that has many encounters, since the expectant mother has her visits to the obstetrician. A round of chemotherapy treatments for a cancer patient is also an episode.
An episode has a start and end date. Attention episodes are sets of encounters or admissions with a common purpose. Often, it is a patient's condition that encompasses several encounters, such as pregnancy, back pain, or workers' compensation. Encounters can be linked to a care episode for easy review and notification.
The first step in any Connect Care clinical workflow must connect the patient to the context. Before looking for a patient, find out if the goal is to manage a consultation (outpatient), an admission (inpatient), or a sequence of related events (episode). The 20 main new reasons for the encounter and the new episodes of attention, as well as the relationship between the reason for the encounter (headache) and the disease (sinusitis), support the potential of episodic epidemiology and some important clinical considerations in family medicine. Clients returning to the emergency room to receive a series of treatments (intravenous antibiotics) will need to have a new appointment created separately for each visit.
The type of home care consultation is assigned to clients who are served by care providers at the client's home or place of residence. With this recommendation, since the data element of the diagnosis of an encounter would specifically consist of the full range of encoded diagnoses of the encounter, it will also be necessary to adopt a separate data element on the main reason for the encounter, as indicated by the patient or observed by the clinical care team. Certain advances in care are restricted for some types of encounters, so in those cases, a new encounter must be created for the patient. The context can be a clinical question, a meeting with healthcare providers, a stay at a health facility, or a series of events related to a care episode.
In many cases, this represents a period of time in which the healthcare provider has a certain level of responsibility for the care of patients in relation to a specific condition or problem, even if they are not currently participating in an encounter. The adoption of these independent data elements will achieve multiple purposes, such as covering the full range of contextual diagnostic information relevant to the encounter, ensuring clarity and sensitivity in the types of diagnoses that may be present at an encounter that must be supported by these data elements, and aligning with subsequent exchange standards. This type of encounter is used for record management only and does not reflect a real customer. who shows up for treatment.
The meetings are codified by the Health Information Management (HIM) coding team to report to the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI).
