Discharge an Emergency Patient With a Note

Who / when: the ED Physician, when an emergency patient is well enough to go home and does not need to be admitted. ED means Emergency Department; “disposition” is the outcome decision that closes an emergency visit. This guide covers the discharge disposition, which sends the patient home with a discharge note.

1. ED Physician — open ED → Disposition. The worklist shows every active emergency visit awaiting a decision. Open the patient you are discharging.
2. ED Physician — in the disposition panel, choose “Discharge”. The form expands so you can capture the discharge details.
3. ED Physician — record the discharge information: the follow-up instructions (where and when the patient should be seen again) and any advice they leave with. This is what becomes the patient’s discharge note.
4. ED Physician — confirm the disposition. Veona generates a discharge-note PDF and stores it encrypted in Veona Storage (the shared, per-tenant encrypted file vault every module uses). The note is linked to the emergency visit, so it is always retrievable from the patient’s record.
5. ED Physician — open or download the discharge note to print or hand to the patient. It comes back as a genuine, branded PDF.

Note

The discharge note is stored encrypted at rest and tied to this emergency encounter. Producing it is signed to you and audited — there is always a record of who discharged the patient and when, and what they were told to do next.

Tip

Discharging from the ED frees the patient from casualty, not from a ward bed. A patient who was admitted to a ward is discharged from there instead — see Discharge From the Ward and Free the Bed.

What happens next

The emergency visit is closed with a discharge disposition recorded against it, and the encrypted note stays in the patient’s record. Any charges raised during the visit flow to billing automatically, and the patient can be seen again at any time under the same UHID (their permanent VNA-… hospital number).

Follow the trail

• Previous: Triage an Emergency Patient to the Board
• Related: Admit an Emergency Patient to a Ward · Refer an Emergency Patient Out With a Packet