You can link an external payer to a patient (such as an employer, parent, or guardian), who can pay for invoices on their behalf. The paying account can either be an existing patient record on your system or a contact in your system. For information on how to add a contact, click here.
Note: To add an external payer to a patient's record, you must have a role assigned to you that gives you editing permissions for Patients and Invoices.
In this article:
Add a Payer to a Patient Record
You can add a contact as a payer for a patient at any time from the Patients page:
1. Select the patient who you want to add an external payer for.
2. Click the edit icon in the top right-hand corner.
3. Go to the Relationships and emergency contacts section and click Add relationship.
4. Fill out the details of the relationship:
Relationship type: Select Paying account
Patient or contact name: Select the person who is going to be the payer on behalf of the patient
5. Click Add relationship.
6. Click Save at the top of the patient's record.
The contact is now linked to the patient as a payer and you can issue them invoices.
Contact-exclusive relationships
Certain patient relationships are now contact-exclusive, meaning they can only be associated with contacts and not patients themselves.
Who does it apply to?
Contact-exclusive relationships:
Anaesthetist, Pharmacy, Practitioner, Referring clinician, Social Worker, Insurance provider
Contact / Patient relationships:
Emergency contact, Family member, Next of kin, Payer/Guardian, Paying account, Spouse/Partner
2. You can see a tag to all options in the drop down of whether that person is a ‘contact’ or ‘patient’.
3. When selecting an existing contact to add to a relationship, you'll also have access to view their contact details. This feature aims to minimise the likelihood of selecting the wrong contact.
This feature was implemented due to a rare yet possible scenario where a person, such as a patient, also serves as a referring clinician to the same clinic. In such cases, there can be multiple instances of this person's details (e.g., name, email, address, phone number) associated with different roles.
This could potentially result in incorrect details being applied to the patient's profile through their relationships.
Create an Invoice for an External Payer
To bill an invoice to an external payer:
1. Start creating a patient invoice as you normally would. For information on how to do this, see here.
2. Go to the Billing section of the invoice and select the external payer from the Billing to dropdown menu.
3. Finish filling out the details of the invoice.
4. Click Save invoice.
The invoice is created and the external payer appears in the To section:
