5.9 Encounter リソース

Home ＞ Administrative ＞ Encounter [encounter]

An interaction between a patient and healthcare provider(s) for the purpose of providing healthcare service(s) or assessing the health status of a patient.

The resource name as it appears in a RESTful URL is [root]/encounter/

A patient encounter is further characterized by the setting in which it takes place, amongst them are ambulatory, emergency, home health, inpatient and virtual encounters. An Encounter encompasses the lifecycle from pre-admission, the actual encounter (for ambulatory encounters), and admission, stay and discharge (for inpatient encounters). During the encounter the patient may move from practitioner to practitioner and location to location.

Because of the broad scope of Encounter, not all elements will be relevant in all settings. For this reason, admission/discharge related information is kept in a separate Hospitalization component within Encounter. The class element is used to distinguish between these settings, which will guide further validation and application of business rules.

There is also substantial variance from organization to organization (and between jurisdictions and countries) on which business events translate to the start of a new Encounter, or what level of aggregation is used for Encounter. I.e. Each single visit of a practitioner during a hospitalization may lead to a new instance of Encounter, but depending on use and systems involved, it may well be that this is aggregated to a single instance for the whole hospitalization. Even more aggregation may occur where jurisdictions introduce groups of Encounters for financial or other reasons. Encounters can be aggregated or grouped under other Encounters using the partOf element.

Encounter instances may exist before the actual encounter takes place to convey pre-admission information, including using Encounters elements to reflect the planned start date, planned accommodation or planned encounter locations. In this case the status element is set to 'planned'.

Specifically outside the scope of Encounter are:

• Group encounters -
• Appointment information - use the Appointment resource (yet to be defined). Note that in many systems outpatient encounters (which are in scope for Encounter) and Appointment are used concurrently. In FHIR, Appointment is used for establishing a date for the encounter, while Encounter is applicable to information about the actual Encounter, i.e. the patient showing up.

Alternate definitions: Schema/Schematron, Resource Profile

Notes:

• The class element describes the setting (in/outpatient etc.) in which the Encounter took place. Since this is important for interpreting the context of the encounter, choosing the appropriate business rules to enforce and management of the process, this element is required.
• The Location indicates where the patient has been during the encounter (he might visit multiple locations, e.g. to an MRI room for examinations, while Accommodation keeps information about the bed a patient stays at during a hospitalization.

Search Parameters for RESTful searches. The standard parameters also apply. See Searching for more information.