Appointment Authorizations

Authorizations provide resource, procedure, date, money, and visit restrictions in regard to patient treatment as they associated with individual appointments. They are created and managed in case demographics, but they are decremented only as they are integrated into the patient's treatment by being assigned to appointments that are scheduled for the patient.

1. Do one of the following:
1. Schedule a new appointment
2. Edit an existing appointment

The Edit Appointment screen will appear.

2. Authorizations
• When scheduling a new appointment, the valid authorizations—those that meet the domain-resource combinations associated with the appointment—are listed in the Authorizations line item of the Scheduling Options panel. If more than one valid authorization exists, WellSky Resource Manager selects the oldest automatically. "Oldest" refers to when the authorization was entered into the program, not the effective dates of the authorization.
• Authorizations are not assigned automatically if the "Use the Edit Appointment Screen when Making Appointments" option is disabled in system or domain settings. Users must edit the appointment and assign them manually: e.g., when the appointment is edited, "No Authorization" will appear in the line item.

Select a different value from the drop-down list if you do not want to use the default value.

3. Complete the rest of the appointment details.
4. Click Continue to complete the appointment.

Key Considerations

• If a case does not have an authorization assigned to it, then the Authorization line item will not appear on the Edit Appointment screen.
• Authorized visits and treatment (e.g., an authorized procedure) are controlled by the scheduling parameters. So care should be taken to make the appropriate selection. Mistakes not only affect patient treatment but also may create billing issues.
• Only authorizations with a status of Pending or Open can be assigned to an appointment.
• User must have the operations "Book Beyond End Visit Date of Auth" and "Book Beyond Max Visit Count of Auth" set to Full in their security profile in order to override these authorization parameters.