org.openmrs.module.webservices.rest.web.response.ConversionException: patient on class org.openmrs.Encounter

The REST API does not consistently support posting default/full representations as properties of the thing you want to create.

To be safe, try replacing all those object (e.g. patient, encounterType, visit, location) with just their uuid.

(I think this may have been partially but not completely fixed since I wrote this in 2015, and you can see how some old code I wrote uses just UUIDs instead of the full objects here and here.)