Stream: implementers
Topic: linking episodes of care
Christian Jeppesen (Nov 18 2016 at 15:50):
A question from a FHIR Newbie
I’m looking at a use case, where I have to keep track of the patient’s main physician throughout his treatment within a hospital group. I intent to use EpisodeOfCare and the careManager element for this purpose with managingOrganisation being the individual hospitals or lower organisation units.
DSTU2 says, that each organization will have their own EpisodeOfCare which tracks their responsibility with the patient. That is fine, but as I see it, it also means that there will be a series of episode of care instances, which makes up the full “treatment episode” for a specific condition.
Now, if I consider a complex patient who receives treatment for different conditions in parallel, how can I figure out which episode of care instances belongs to which “treatment episode”?
I guest a unique condition for each “treatment episode” is one option. But are you really expected to have that?
Currently, I consider extending EpisodeOfCare with a previousReference element, so that I can represent the sequence making op a “treatment episode”. Does that sound as a good solution?
I also consider extending EpiodeOfCare with a partOf reference (like Encounter), so that I can have different a different type of EpisodeOfCare representing the “treatment episode”.
Regards,
Christian Jeppsen
Lloyd McKenzie (Nov 18 2016 at 18:00):
Do you have a single "Patient" instance shared among the hospital group? If so, you don't need to have an EpisodeOfCare to represent their overall care by the hospitals - you can simply track their primary physician on the Patient instance directly and leave EpisodeOfCare instances to track care associated with particular conditions.
Brian Postlethwaite (Nov 27 2016 at 10:30):
Yes, you just keep using the same episode of care, so no need to link to another one.
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
