Register a subspecialty into appointment

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Hi,

I’m André from Brazil and I need some help with the appointment structure.

I’m developing a feature that requires to record information about the appointment subspecialty into the resource Appointment. In our context, a subspecialty is a more specific specialty of a practitioner, like “hand surgeon” for a “surgeon”. In our resources, we use the field specialty to record the practitioner specialty (surgeon), but the field to register the subspecialty is not clear to me.

I’m thinking to use the field serviceCategory to record this information, but I’m not sure if a subspecialty should be included in the definition of a “broad categorization of the service that is to be performed during this appointment”. My other option is to create an appointment extension for this information.

Can you help me with this situation? There is another option to be considered?

Thanks for the help!

André.

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specialty is a CodeableConcept, so it’s possible to send multiple codes. So long as they’re talking about the same thing and are just conveying different levels of granularity of coding, that’s a completely legitimate thing to do - though it does mean that the receiver needs to understand the codes and their relationship to figure out which codings correspond to a high-level ‘specialty’ vs. a lower-level ‘sub-specialty’. As well, the model doesn’t presume a specific number of levels. In theory, you could have specialty, sub-specialty, sub-sub-specialty, etc. Key is that if you have multiple sub-specialties, you need different repetitions of ‘specialty’ even if the higher-level code is the same for all of them.

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Hi, Lloyd!

It makes sense. I’ll use these levels in specialty to add this sub-specialty info.

Thanks for your response!

André