Specimen status management

Hi There,
I’m implementing a solution for a laboratory to manage samples (Specimen). In this context, I’m managing the life cycle of a Sample using a Status field.

In my software, the Specimen may stay in some Status as:

  • ‘Due’: The first status is when the Sample is created in the software, but there is not a real physical sample;
  • ‘Being collected’: stating that the Sample is being collected by the Patient;
  • ‘Received’: when the patient gives the Sample to the laboratory;
  • ‘Under analysis’: indicating that the Sample is being analyzed by a laboratory technician;
  • And so on…

The resource Specimen has the fields “status” and “condition”.

However, the “status” field seems inappropriate as it doesn’t cover all statuses of my business rules and it is Required. The field “condition” seems inappropriate to represent status as ‘Due’, ‘being collected’, and ‘Received’.

Resuming my question: How do you recommend I use Fhir to represent my own Specimen Status life cycle?

Thank you very much in advance!

1 Like

These are status that tracks the state of completion of collecting a specimen and can be tracked using the Task resource as shown in these examples here:Task - FHIR v4.3.0. Otherwise you will need to create a custom extension on Specimen to track the collection status.

1 Like