Patient and Encounter Database Records

1

Hello,

we are currently in the process of implementing an interface to adapt with FHIR resources.
As a good implementation, when saving a new patient admission, do we create a new Patient model too? Or every patient is unique and will have set of encounters?

1 Like
2

Hello @Hussein,

It is a good apporach to save the patient resource too, if no, you wont link others admissions to the same patient easily.

If there is not enough info to save the patient and to link patient aftwards, eg: the system only knows patient’s name, you can create a contained resource: https://www.hl7.org/fhir/references.html#contained

Cya

3

Thanks @Luan,

please consider the following 2 scenarios:

  1. The same patient had two admissions to the same hospital. How should this be represented in the database?
    a. 1 record in Patient table and 2 records in Encounter table
    b. 2 records in Patient and 2 in Encounter

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  1. The same patient had two admissions to two different hospitals
4

Ideally, you should have a single Patient and 2 Encounters. Note however that you might update the Patient record to reflect demographic changes (e.g. new phone number). That would result in two different ‘versions’ of the Patient record with the same id. The old version would still be queriable if the server supports history. The Encounter reference to Patient could be version-specific, but typically would not be.