Stream: patient administration WG
Topic: Location vs Organization
Michelle (Moseman) Miller (Mar 15 2018 at 18:02):
I was curious to understand more about GF#13607, which added hoursOfOperation to Location. There was a comment saying it would be inappropriate to support hoursOfOperation on the Organization resource. I'm just curious to understand the rationale preferring Location over Organization because I see validated healthcare directory IG adding more and more extensions to Location (like whether new patients are accepted). Admittedly, boundaries are fuzzy between Organizations and Locations, but adding these new elements to Location seems to make those boundaries even fuzzier. Thoughts?
Peter Jordan (Mar 15 2018 at 19:20):
In NZ primary care there is a very clear distinction between Location (facility in our nomenclature) and Organization. Organizations can own multiple general practices and those practices may be spread over several facilities, each with its own opening hours and enrolling status.
Simone Heckmann (May 09 2018 at 09:51):
My understanding is that a Location doesn't do anything. It doesn't accept patients or open or close or provide services. It's just an address, a place, a room, a geolocation.
It's always the Organization doing stuff at a location. So if an Organization has different "outposts" in different locations which offer different services at different times, these "outposts" IMO would be Organizations themselves with a partOf-relationship to the primary Organization.
Simone Heckmann (May 09 2018 at 09:53):
...or - as Brian wrote in the follow-up to the CR - the things an Organization does at a specific location could be modeled as HealthcareService.
Brian Postlethwaite (May 09 2018 at 12:15):
I'd prefer to model those as HealthcareService resources
Simone Heckmann (May 09 2018 at 13:33):
But I agree with Michelle, that the latest additions to location such as hoursOfOperation make the boundaries between Location and HealthcareService/Organization more unclear. The only context in which opening hours for a location make sense is if a Location is physically inaccessible in a certain period of time, like "gate closes at midnight". (Which is - as I understand it - exactly the use case for which this element has been introduced).
Maybe the term "hoursOfOperation" which has been chosen - I assume - for reasons of consistency with HealthcareService, is somewhat misleading.
"openingHours" or "accessibilityHours" would be more to the point, considering we're talking about floors and buildings here, not provision of service.
Brian Postlethwaite (May 10 2018 at 10:31):
That sounds like some good wording to include in the descriptive section of the property(s).
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
