Availability FHIR Resource Proposal

Availability

Owning committee name

Patient Administration

Contributing or Reviewing Work Groups

• "None"

FHIR Resource Development Project Insight ID

pending

Scope of coverage

The Availability is used to cover:

• a "planning horizon" of time where a resource has availability resources defined
• What type of appointment(s) may be booked into the slots associated with this availability (This may be over-ruled by the associated slots)
• Although the Availability will normally be associated with Location, Practitioner, Device, Patient or RelatedPerson resources, they should be able to be associated with any resource type (likely other resources could be Group, or the yet to be defined EpisodeOfCare or HealthcareService)

The availability does not cover:

• the start/end times for any particular available time (this is covered by the Slot resource)
• a template for a recurrence pattern that could be used to "derive" associated slots. E.g. Mon-Fri 9am-5pm (at this point - this would be an extension if desired as in many systems this is a very complex structure and interaction with timezones would also need to be considered)

RIM scope

Act(Classcode=Slot and ActMood = ActMoodResourceSlot)

Resource appropriateness

Many existing systems publish their resource availability information for consumers (software and people) to be able to understand if/when they can request to book appointments.

Existing products that have calendaring information publish this type of information - often in the iCal standard Free-Busy format.

An Availability resource always exists with an associated set of slot resources except when it is intended to indicate that there are no available time slots within a planning horizon.

Expected implementations

This resource is expected to be implemented in scheduling systems used by clinics, general practices and specialist healthcare provider's to share their availability information.

This information can be used to take appointments directly from users internal or external to the organization providing the information.

The users could be either the Patient, the Provider, or an agent acting on the Patients behalf (such as his General Practitioner or Care Manager)

Content sources

The slot resource has some overlap with the iCal standard, the mapping to this standard will also be in scope of the resource.

We also considered the HL7 v2 and v3 schedule messages and models which are also closely related to the iCal standard and this proposed resource.

Example Scenarios

A Physio-Therapy clinic wants to publish a 2 month planning horizon for where appointments can be booked. It will publish a single Availability resource describing the 2 month range; what it can be used for, and then create the set of time slots that can actually be booked against.

An outpatients clinic's Operating Room publishes its availability information. Several availability records are created to cover the different types of surgery that can be booked into the associated time slots. At this particular outpatient clinic, the mornings slots are available for general surgery appointments, and the afternoon is restricted in the types of appointments due to staffing restrictions and reduced recovery times. By using several availability records the slots associated with these would not need to over-ride the default service type.

Resource Relationships

The Availability Resource can reference "any" other resource as the individual that it is defining availability information for, but will typically only be used for Location, Practitioner, Device, Patient or RelatedPerson resources.

This resource will be referenced by the new Slot resource.

Note: This resource will not be referenced by Appointment resources, the Appointment will reference the Slot resource directly (which then references this availability record)

Timelines

Given the progress to date, we expect that this resource will be ready for inclusion in the next Ballot (expecting September 2014) the resource has already undergone a great deal of review in PA over the last 6 months.

gForge Users

brian_pos ewoutkramer grahameg