Connecting patients to assigned doctors in a hosptial ward

1

Hi there!

What I’m trying to do: for a given hospital, list all of the patients currently admitted to the Labor and Delivery ward and their assigned doctors. The problem I’m encountering is I can’t seem to find anywhere where these relations are served (e.g. relations between hospitals and doctors, doctors and patients, etc.). My best guess was searching EpisodeOfCare for the Organization (which I’m assuming will be the hospital, not the ward), filtering the period to now, grabbing the careManager and patient, and then looking up the patient’s location to filter against the L&D ward. But, playing around with Cerner’s FHIR sandbox, /EpisodeOfCare doesn’t seem to exist.

So, I’m drawing a blank. Any suggestions on where to find this information?

2

Encounter is where you’ll find admissions. It captures the patient, type of encounter, who’s involved in their care and their location.

3

Thanks! Encounter looks like it would have everything I need, but at least Cerner’s implementation (and probably Epic’s as well) requires you to already know the patient in order to look up an Encounter, so I wouldn’t be able to use that to find all the patients in the ward. Is there some mechanism that I’m missing that would allow me to find these patients?

4

Their FHIR interfaces have focused on exposing information for individual patients, not for searching across patients (because there’s considerably more security ramifications to doing the latter). You’ll have to reach out to the EHR vendors to find out their plans, but it’s possible that this information isn’t available right now over a FHIR interface.

5

Thanks, that confirms the impression I got from poking around the API.

It looks like I might be able to get what I need via HL7v2’s event-based notifications to get notified when a patient is admitted. Just gotta poke around that spec more. Thanks again for your prompt and helpful responses!