Stream: implementers
Topic: Slot creation
Jean-Marie Alexandre (Mar 16 2022 at 12:42):
Hi everyone,
I'm discovering the scheduling concept on FHIR and have a question about the Slot resource.
If I understand well, Slots should be created in advance so they can be searched.
Am I right?
Usually, when are they created? Some months in advance?
What is the duration used to create them?
Thanks
Cooper Thompson (Mar 16 2022 at 13:07):
There isn't really one way to do scheduling. In fact, when we surveyed folks last year, everyone was doing it differently Appointment Scheduling - Industry Divergence.
I personally consider scheduling an unsolved problem in FHIR in terms of having a standard way to do it. I have a lot of thoughts about that in the industry divergence document above.
René Spronk (Mar 16 2022 at 13:25):
There's divergence - but if there's a business rule that states that appointments can be made during e.g. 'the next 12 months' you'll have to somehow facilitate that. Whether you accomplish this by creating a full set of static open slots for the next 12 months, or whether you support this 'dynamically' (i.e. responding with open slots that don't even exist yet, vaporware slots, that are only really instantiated if their status goes to anything other than open) is entirely up to a server. The advantage of 'dynamic' slots is that if someone were to go for an appointment which has a non-standard duration, you could simply instantiate a slot for the requested duration. There are probably other ways of doing this as well.
Lloyd McKenzie (Mar 16 2022 at 14:00):
@Brian Postlethwaite
Cooper Thompson (Mar 16 2022 at 14:37):
If you have business requirements to support scheduling via FHIR, then you'd be building a custom solution that you'll need to have your trading partners design to.
Cooper Thompson (Mar 16 2022 at 14:40):
Also, once you get into looking at Slots, you've gotten past the hard part of scheduling already. The hard part is figuring out which set of slots to look at in the first place (i.e. the "Resource Identification" section in the document I linked above).
Jean-Marie Alexandre (Mar 16 2022 at 15:58):
Thanks a lot for your quick feedbacks.
Being kind of free in our implementation will help us move more quickly, and I guess when we'll start interacting with other solutions we'll discover the gap to cross.
Brian Postlethwaite (Mar 17 2022 at 08:11):
This divergence is also implicated by the different areas in healthcare normally do scheduling differently, and have different needs of appointments.
And thus the industry is showing those differences...
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
