Settle a Final Bill at Discharge

A long inpatient stay accrues charges from all over the hospital — the bed-days, the medicines given on the ward, the labs and imaging, a theatre procedure. You should never have to chase those down by hand at the end. When the ward discharges the patient, Veona assembles every open charge from the admission into a single final invoice, and it does this idempotently — re-confirming a discharge never mints a second invoice. This page follows that moment from the billing clerk’s side.

Who / when: the ward nurse (who confirms the discharge on the floor) and the billing clerk (who picks up the final invoice for settlement), at the end of an inpatient stay. A charge is one billable line raised by a clinical event; an invoice is a grouped set of charges presented for settlement; a UHID is the patient’s permanent Unique Health Identifier. We’ll follow the discharge of Mr. Okafor.

1. Ward nurse / ward physician — discharge the patient from Ward → Discharge in the usual way (diagnoses, summary, disposition, then “Confirm discharge”). This is the trigger; the full discharge steps live in Discharge From the Ward and Free the Bed.
2. The system — on that confirmation, the ward posts the final bed-day charge for the stay and then assembles all of the admission’s still-open charges onto one final invoice. You do not click anything for this to happen — it is part of confirming the discharge.
3. Billing clerk — open Bill → Charge Capture and confirm that Mr. Okafor’s Open charges have dropped to zero. Everything that was accruing during the stay has now been pulled onto the invoice.
4. Billing clerk — open Bill → Overview and find the new final invoice. It appears in the Unpaid state, and his outstanding balance has risen by exactly the amount that accrued during the stay.
5. Billing clerk — open the invoice (click the row to reach its detail). Each line carries its audit trail back to the clinical event that raised it — the bed-days, each dispensed drug, each released result — so you can see precisely what is being charged for.

Note

“Idempotent” means the settlement happens once and only once. If the discharge is re-confirmed — or the same patient is discharged again after a re-admission and re-discharge — Veona mints no duplicate final invoice. You can trust the single tidy bill.

Tip

If a billable event genuinely could not be inferred automatically (something captured on paper, say), add it as a manual charge on Bill → Charge Capture before you settle, so it lands on the same final invoice rather than as a stray line afterwards.

What happens next

The stay is closed, the bed is free, and finance has one invoice instead of a scatter of loose charges. From here the invoice follows the ordinary revenue cycle: it is turned into a scheme-priced invoice where currency and payer pricing apply, and then settled by a cashier through Take a Payment, Deposit or Refund. The discharge-side view of this same moment is documented in Produce the Final Bill on Discharge.

Follow the trail

• Previous: Discharge From the Ward and Free the Bed
• Next: Turn Charges Into a Scheme-Priced Invoice
• Related: Produce the Final Bill on Discharge · Auto-Aggregate Consumed Services Into Charges