FHIR - Community care

Question

I'm currently working on an administrative information system for primary care, using the FHIR specification as reference in some use cases.

For community care, I didn't find any corresponding resources. Anyone have any idea how I can implement community care "encounters"? The encounter resource in FHIR doesn't allow multiple patients. Same for Appointment. While this resource allow the use of multiple patients, it doesn't have a direct reference for a group of patients (e.g. Community or Family). Would it make sense to use another Actor type in the Participant element, rather than "A person or Device"?

Answer 1

As always, it depends on what the purpose of the encounter is. You could create an encounter for each participant in the group session and then make them all a part-of a parent encounter that joins them together that doesn't have a patient specified. This would then ensure that each patients history is still correct and representative of what has occurred. Also if govt reporting is required you still have the granularity needed, maybe you'd need an extension to indicate reporting status, group claiming vs per client claiming.

Will pass this onto the patient admin group for some discussion.

Brian