Adding Claim Line Items?

[KPSLHoldings]

if we want to push adjudicated claim data back into a canvas instance e.g. mso billing service processes claims externally, the sdk seems to only allow adding billing line items to notes but not adding claim line items. Unfortunately, during experimentation/testing we saw that creating billing line items doesn't automatically create corresponding claim line items. Is this expected behavior? somehow during the claim creation process, claim line items are linked to billing line items but how do we replicate this?

thanks.

[rmagier1]

Hi @KPSLHoldings,

Good question — what you're seeing is expected behavior, and there's a clean way to update the claim line items.

Billing line items and claim line items are deliberately separate, and the reason comes down to where each one lives in the workflow.

Think of the note as a staging area that's in flux while charting is happening. The billing line items you add to a note footer are the working, still-editable version of the charges — they can be added, changed, or removed as the visit is documented. Because they're a work in progress, they don't automatically flow through to the claim. Claim line items, by contrast, live on the claim and represent the more final, billable picture.

The handoff from "draft charges on the note" to "claim line items on the claim" only happens on a deliberate action — locking the note or pushing charges. That's the point where Canvas treats the billing as final, generates the claim line items, and links each one back to the billing line item it came from. So there's no SDK call to create a claim line item directly, because that step is meant to be driven by the note reaching that finalized state.

This is also why you saw billing line items without corresponding claim line items: until that deliberate action happens, the billing is still considered in-progress and hasn't been committed to the claim yet.

From the SDK you can trigger this with the Note effect:

• Note(...).push_charges() — pushes the note's billing line items to the associated claim and generates the linked claim line items. This is identical to clicking the Push Charges button in the note footer. (The note type must be billable.)
• Note(...).lock() — locking a billable note also generates/refreshes the claim and its line items. This will also finalize the note and put it in a locked state.

So the flow is:

1. Add your billing line items to the note (AddBillingLineItem).
2. Call push_charges() on the note to directly update the claim line items without changing the note's state (or lock() if you are done with that visit note).
3. Canvas generates the claim line items and links them to the billing line items.

After that, the claim line items exist as real records, and you can read them back and reference them by ID. If you need to adjust an existing claim line item's charge or linked diagnoses, there's an UpdateClaimLineItem effect for that.

Hope that helps!