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Using the FHO+ time code billing panel

Introduction

Accessing the panel

Panel legend

Using the panel

Under the hood

Introduction

If you're reading this, you're likely a member of an Ontario FHO. As such, you already know all about the new daily billing codes added in the 2026 PSA update in April. If you're looking for previous documentation, we've written:

A more in depth explanation of adding the codes 

And information about our previous triage report

This new panel combines the tracking and measuring tooling in the report template with some automation related to estimation, quick bill creation, and other quality of life features to minimize the time you spend on tracking your time every day while helping you maximize your time code billing. 

No fiddling with a dummy demographic or manually making invoices, no writing an encounter note, no forms. Just a few clicks a month can handle all your hourly billing.

In this brief guide, we'll show you how to read the panel, how to use it, and how it all works in the background (if you're curious.)

Accessing the panel

The panel is available to all users with billing permissions (so doctors and administrators by default) via Admin > Billing > FHO Billing.

If you are on Oscar Pro version 1.20 or higher and do not see this tool, contact your clinic administrator for assistance.

Panel Legend

There's a lot going on on this new panel, so we'll break it down by section. If you can survive manually doing hourly billing you'll fly right through, rest assured.

Header

  1. Quick month selector: Defaults to the current month, but allows quick access to the months within stale date range.
  2. Manual month selector: Allows access to any month, including future dates.
  3. Provider selector: Defaults to the logged in user (you), but allows selection.
  4. Status selector: Defaults to all, but allows filtering by specific date statuses as described below.
  5. Print: A printer friendly version of the report, typically for auditing purposes.
  6. Submit all outstanding: creates an invoice with the selected values for valid days of the displayed month. In this case, valid invoices include those with the 'Reviewing' status and any non-0 time unit entered. It will not submit blank bills or re-submit for previously billed days.
  7. Settings: Allows you to set some defaults, notably your default notes value for your daily indirect billing logs.

Body

  1. Status: Each day is marked as one of:
      Submitted (invoice already exists) 
      Reviewing (No invoice exists yet)
      Upcoming (an unfinished day, such as today or tomorrow)
  2. Date: The service date for the row.
  3. Hours: Total hours of all codes combined for that day.
  4. Q310A: Estimated hours of direct patient care for rostered patients. All such values can be adjusted manually until submitted.
  5. Q311A: Estimated hours of remote phone calls with rostered patients.
  6. Q312A: Estimated hours of indirect patient care (not with patients, but for them.)
  7. Q313A: Estimated hours of clinic admin time not related to any specific patient.
  8. Notes: A space to track daily activity, as required when submitting a Q312A or Q313A. A default value can be set in the settings menu.
  9. Totals: Totals for each column are shown, including the percentage ratio of the available hours.
  10. Warnings: A warning icon will appear next to any percentile value that is deemed out of bounds.

Footer

  1. Donut Graph: A quick visual for your ratios for the month.
  2. Total hours: Including all statuses.
  3. Direct care combined hours: Q310A and Q311A combined as a total and percentage.
  4. Indirect care combined hours: Q312A and Q313A combined as a total and percentage. In this case showcasing a warning that the ratio is out of bounds.
  5. Submitted hours: Total hours for the month that are already submitted.
  6. Outstanding hours: Total unsubmitted hours for the month including estimates for future days.

Using the panel

Now that we know how to parse all the information on the screen, it can be a bit intimidating. Fortunately day-to-day use is quite simple.

Periodically (at least once a month) you'll want to open up the panel and review your outstanding work days.

Make adjustments as needed by typing in new numbers or clicking the up and down arrows to adjust hours. 

Once you're satisfied (and if it's near the end of the month, have all your ratios balanced), just click the 'Submit all Outstanding' button to create the invoices.

You're all done! All that's left is the usual billing simulation and generation, same as any other billing.

Under the hood

While not required reading, we understand that some of you will want to know exactly what's going on when we make these estimates and create all these invoices for you.

Q310A

We estimate this value by tracking all the patients on your schedule which are marked as rostered in the demographic record, and adding up their scheduled appointment time for the day. In addition, since we all know that (unfortunately) schedules rarely run to time, we take any time between the last rostered appointment of the day and the note being saved for that appointment and add that on.

Q311A

This one is a bit simpler; we do the above but only count appointments which have an encounter type of 'Telephone appointment with patient.' This will be adjustable in an upcoming release.

Q312A

For this one, we take your total active time in the system for that day (login to logout, basically) and then subtract the time devoted to direct patient care above. This one is definitely a bit more of an estimate, but it should provide a reasonable guess.

Q313A

This one should be quite slim, since it's also counted as part of the 25% cap on indirect care and Q312A will, by and large, already hit that. As such, and because there's no common path to identify this time vs regular Q312A time, we don't make an estimate for this value.

Rounding

Since codes can only be submitted in 15 minute time units, we round to the nearest 15 as per the published rules. We also round any manual inputs, so if you try to type an invalid unit value it will round to the nearest .25 hours.

Creating invoices

When you first click the 'Submit all Outstanding' button, a new demographic is made with the name 'FIRSTLAST, FHOBilling' where FIRSTLAST is the selected provider name. Invoices generated are always assigned to this patient.

Correcting invoices

Generally you'll review and edit these invoices via Invoice reports as part of your normal billing process, but in case you want to review them outside of this report they can be found and corrected in the usual way by looking up your automatically generated dummy patient above and editing their billing history.