Stream: implementers
Topic: Resource for Provider
Al Buchala (Oct 24 2019 at 17:51):
I am trying to determine which resource is best for communicating Providers for the PACE program. In PACE, a provider can be a person or an organization. My two option at the moment are to use the Practitioner resource for either type ( a person provider or an organization provider), or use a reference element where it can either be a Practitioner resource or an Organization resource. Is one a better practice, over the other? or is there a better approach?
John Moehrke (Oct 24 2019 at 17:53):
why not either of them? Not clear to me why you would need to allow only one type of resource. I would also include PractionerRole as that shows a relationship between a Practitioner and an Organization, so it covers two answers in one.
Al Buchala (Oct 24 2019 at 19:05):
Thank you @John Moehrke , I realized I wasn't clear, my apologies. In PACE, the Provider is one single resource which holds information about either a person or organization. For example, when requesting a list of Providers, it would contain a mix of people and organizations.
Lloyd McKenzie (Oct 24 2019 at 19:15):
You can use PractitionerRole to point to either or both
Al Buchala (Oct 24 2019 at 19:25):
Thank you @Lloyd McKenzie . I just looked into the PractitioinerRole resource, and I think it will work.
John Moehrke (Oct 24 2019 at 20:04):
in a FHIR context one could have a query that returns a bundle of resources where the bundle can contain many Practitioner, PractitionerRole, and/or Organizations. Each type of resource is self describing in a FHIR context.
Brian Postlethwaite (Oct 24 2019 at 21:14):
It sounds like the pace system stored orgs and pracs in the same table?
Some systems I've worked with do this too, and does make it messy.
Really should be 2 types as you've noted. And practitioner role doesn't cover the org only answer.
Lloyd McKenzie (Oct 25 2019 at 00:25):
PractitionerRole lets you point to an Organization without specifying a Practitioner or a specialty. There's a slight semantic difference between saying "Someone from this Organization is responsible" vs. "This organization is responsible", but that doesn't matter in many cases @Brian Postlethwaite
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
