Stream: smart/scheduling-links
Topic: Sub-Brands
Josh Mandel (Apr 21 2021 at 15:25):
Thanks @Nick Muerdter for this comment:
Sub-Brands: This is probably the least important issue and there are potential workarounds, but just thought I’d ask. For certain pharmacy providers, they have many brands their stores might operate under (eg, Kroger has King Soopers, City Market, etc). I realize these providers may choose a variety of ways to publish their data, so this may be a more specific question for them, but I’m just curious if there would be any recommendations for how to represent this data. Ideally, I’d like to be able to easily group the stores by these brands that users are actually familiar with. In the spec, this information may be embedded in the location name, or could be possibly be derived from the location’s URL, but I’m not sure there’s anywhere this is super clearly separated out if you wanted to be able to programmatically handle these type of brands. But this may be out of scope, and that’s also fine.
It's a great question, and it begs another: how are main brands communicated? I'm guessing you might be treating a slot as a "Kroger" slot because it's coming from a Kroger $bulk-publish endpoint, but that pattern breaks down in the case of aggregators re-publishing info from multiple sources. I think we might want to give stronger advice that the Location.name field should at least contain consumer-relevant branding like "Kroger Store #123" or "City Market Store #456".
Josh Mandel (Apr 21 2021 at 15:26):
Beyond that, if we really wanted to lean into the FHIR models here, a Location.managingOrganization can provide a display name for the org in charge of a location, or could even link to an Organization resource that's part of a hierarchy via Organization.partOf (but as the complexity grows, I worry about the challenges of implementers "getting it right").
Josh Mandel (Apr 21 2021 at 15:28):
So maybe the easy steps here is:
- Document that Location.name SHOULD include some branding that consumers should recognize (e.g., at the level of a sub-brand if relevant, or brand if not)
... does that help, and is it enough?
Ryan Owens (Apr 21 2021 at 16:00):
For Kroger at least, I'm expecting that our location name's will be comparable to what is currently available on VaccineFinder.org, so for example "Ralphs Pharmacy #xxxxx".
Nick Muerdter (Apr 21 2021 at 16:22):
Yeah, I think if this information were included in the name, that would fulfill most use-cases.
The only thing this maybe makes more difficult is if you're trying to actually organize and filter the data based on these sub-brands, since then you'd have to rely on free-form text matching of the name field, and that can obviously be more error-prone. I don't feel particularly strongly about this, though, just mentioning it as a potential use-case, since I had a lot of requests on Vaccine Spotter to filter by pharmacy brand (although I think the primary reason why was people getting frustrated with certain pharmacy websites), so this could be a bit more difficult to do with this data model. But I'm not sure this use-case is all that important. :shrug:
Josh Mandel (Apr 21 2021 at 16:24):
Yeah, I think some naming advice here would go a long way; it'd let tools like Vaccine Spotter maintain a manual list of sub-brands with associated regexes or something -- it's not perfect but seems let it wouldn't be a blocker. I'll add a quick PR.
Josh Mandel (Apr 21 2021 at 16:26):
Added https://github.com/smart-on-fhir/smart-scheduling-links/pull/31 -- comments or tweaks welcome!
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
