Address Book/Contact List FHIR Resources

1

Hopefully this is pretty simple query. I’m new to this and trying to get my head around converting our practice address book/contact list to FHIR and wondering if I’m on the right track.

We’ve got two types of entries in our address book: individuals and companies. Individual entries for a person, which contain basic things like a name, address, speciality, HPI-I number (optional), a physical and postal address, as well as contact info. A person can be a doctor, an IT person, anyone really. Then there’s also company/organisation entries, which contain a name, HPI-O number (optional), a physical and postal address. Again, like a person, there is no stipulation that this company/organisation is medically related, it could be an insurer or IT Company.

Individual entries and company/organisation are considered sperate entities, meaning there’s no current way to link an individual to the organisation entry they work for at this stage.

I assume we’d simply map the company/organisation entries to the Organization resource? The individual I’m not so sure about. Would they map to the Person resource?

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

2

Organization is definitely the right answer for your first question. The answer to the second question is “it depends”. In most systems it would be Practitioner - which covers anyone who’s working in their “professional” capacity - whether that’s as a clinician, a receptionist, a database technician or a taxi driver. However, if your phone-book also includes patients and/or their friends and relatives, then that brings Patient and RelatedPerson into the mix. In that case, Person would be your fallback. Person is typically only used as a linking resource but it can also be used to maintain common demographic information.