MedLook Weekly Tip For 04/02/2006

Superbills are largely a thing of the past for many offices but they still are very useful in others.  MedLook provides one superbill that can easily be customized using a word processor to contain the information that your office requires.  To edit, create and print one or more superbills you have to use the custom reports (see September to October 2005 tips for more details on this).  The superbill provided is found in the product template folder (c:\program files\rem systems\medlook\template) and is named Encounter2.rtf.

To generate a superbill requires selecting one or more patients.  This requires using the Customization of Patients or Appointments.  If you use the scheduler in MedLook then using the Appointments is the best option as you can list and select all patients by a day or date range.  The superbill itself is generated from the template and that must be defined in the Template text box.  You can simple browse for Encounter2.rtf in the product directory or copy the template to your own personal folder (highly recommended, something like c:\MedLookTemplates) and browse to your own file.  Use the Edit... button on the Template line to invoke a word processor to edit the superbill template.  What you have on your superbill is limited mostly by your own creativity and office requirements but usually, simple is better.

Once you have the remaining fields set as you wish select the Process command and the superbills will be generated in the Output Folder.  If you selected Single File they will be in one file called Encounter2.rtf (to match the file template name); otherwise they will be in individual files named as Encounter2_<PatientNumber>.rtf.  Use the Explore command to open the folder with the superbills and from there you can use your word processor to further edit them or send them to the printer (or email them, etc.).  Pay special attention to margin and page settings to make sure you have your file formatted so that it will print what you expect.  On most systems the template settings are too wide and require changing them for each file.

If you make so many changes to template\Encounter2.rtf that you cannot get it back to a useable state you can retrieve the original from template\defaults\encounter2.rtf.  The defaults directory is used to hold "backups" of the templates just in case you mess up the sample and want to return to the original.  They are also on the CD or in the product setup.

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