Discharge From the Ward and Free the Bed

When a patient is well enough to go home, the ward discharges them. In one step Veona closes the stay, writes the discharge summary (the diagnoses, the story of the admission, and what should happen next), produces it as a branded PDF stored encrypted, frees the bed for the next patient, and settles all the stay’s open charges into a single final bill. Nothing is left dangling — the bed is genuinely available, the patient leaves with their summary, and finance has one tidy invoice.

Who / when: the ward physician (who decides the patient is fit for discharge) and the ward nurse, at the end of an inpatient stay. We’ll follow the discharge of Mr. Okafor.

1. Ward physician / nurse — open Ward → Discharge.
2. Ward physician — enter the ICD-11 diagnoses (the standard international diagnosis codes for the stay; search and pick them) and write the discharge summary — the course of the admission and the plan for after discharge.
3. Ward physician — set the disposition (where the patient is going — home, transfer out, and so on).
4. Ward physician / nurse — select “Discharge patient”, then “Confirm discharge”.
5. Veona produces the discharge-summary PDF (discharge-summary-<admission>.pdf), stores it encrypted in the shared Storage module, frees the bed on Ward → Bed Map, and settles the stay’s open charges into one final invoice.

Note

The discharge summary PDF is stored encrypted, like every clinical document in Veona. The patient can download it later from their portal, and the team can retrieve it from Mr. Okafor’s record — it is never a loose file on someone’s desktop.

Caution

Discharge frees the bed straight away, so it becomes available to the next patient the moment you confirm. Make sure the summary and disposition are right before you select “Confirm discharge” — and remember that any note signed during the stay can only be changed afterwards through the eSign amendment chain, never quietly overwritten.

What happens next

Mr. Okafor’s bed is free and ready for the next admission, and his stay is closed. The final bill is the moment the money side completes: every charge raised during the admission — the bed-days, the medicines, any tests — was accruing quietly all along, and discharge assembles them into one invoice for settlement. That is the handoff to finance, covered in Settle a Final Bill at Discharge. Re-confirming a discharge mints no second invoice — the settlement happens once.

Follow the trail

• Previous: Admit a Patient to a Ward Bed · Transfer a Patient Between Beds or Wards
• Next: Settle a Final Bill at Discharge
• Related: Complete Ward Nursing Rounds · Administer, Hold or Refuse Medication on the Ward MAR