Stream: patient administration WG
Topic: patient time zone
Javier Espina (Jul 27 2020 at 08:36):
In some use cases it is necessary to know the time zone of home-based patients and when their day starts (e.g. to know when their sleeping hours are, or whether something happened at their 8am). Where can that info be modeled in FHIR?
I thought of Encounter.location. But timezone would be only implicit (I guess it could be indirectly derived from location.position). And location.hoursOfOperation is described in a way that seems to exclude the use for home-based patients (to indicate when their "awake" day starts and ends)
Brian Postlethwaite (Jul 29 2020 at 20:54):
I'd suggest in most places this would have to be implicit, and in the community system I used to work on it was based on the home address of the patient. In a residential aged care facility it might be implied in the location of the facility, it could be in a patient calendar which included respite/leave details, in a hospital environment it might be based on encounter data.
Mikael Rinnetmäki (Aug 01 2020 at 06:17):
I would add that the "whether something happened at their 8am" is often recorded in the resource describing that something. For instance, Observations have an .effectiveDateTime / .effectivePeriod / effectiveTiming / effectiveInstant field. Same for nearly all resources describing that something happened. Ideally, that field would be expressed in local time of the observation, including time zone information. From this information you're able to tell whether it was 8am for the patient, even when they were on holiday several time zones from their home. @Javier Espina
Mikael Rinnetmäki (Aug 01 2020 at 06:18):
Same for Encounter.period. You can (and should) record the time zone there.
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
