Hey Medplum Team, I wanted to provide you with an overview of our project: Our project involves implementing patient and caregiver scheduling features within our EHR platform. Our primary goal is to enable our operations team to efficiently manage appointments for patients and caregivers using a weekly calendar view. Key aspects of our project include handling scheduling validation, error management, and strict regulatory requirements for time overlaps and appointment durations. Currently, we don't have a concept of requesting appointments; all appointments will be set manually. The flexibility of time slots is determined by the UI, which allows our operations team to select and create appointments seamlessly. Additionally, we have different user roles with varying permissions, including our Care Ops and Registered Nurses. Given this context, we'd greatly appreciate your insights on the following: Resource Choice: Should we primarily work with the "Appointment" resource for our scheduling features to help reduce complexity, or would it make sense to include the "Schedule" and/or "Slot" resources in our implementation? What are the benefits of using the 'Schedule' and 'Slot' resources in our scenario? Data Modeling: If we do include "Schedule" and/or "Slot," how should we model our data to best represent our scheduling needs? Are there any best practices or recommendations you can provide? Future-Proofing: We're also thinking about future features like requesting appointment time slots from patients or caregivers. How can we structure our data model to accommodate potential future requirements? We're eager to hear your thoughts and recommendations! Thank you very much for your assistance.

Are these personal calendars? Like each practitioner has a single one? Or do they have facility requirements or geographic constraings?

There's one calendar that is the same view (accessing same data) for all of our Nurses. The calendar itself is a weekly view that can transition by week. This is a calendar that can show a display of all appointments for any patient and caregiver in our system (But will only display based on one caregiver or patient selected at a time). i.e. showing 6-7 appointments for the week for a single patient or a single caregiver but never multiple. Not sure if that's sufficient to answer your question, let me know if I can provide more information for you. I also setup a sync for tomorrow if that's easier.

Schedule, Slot and Appointment are the typical 3, but usually linked to person or facilities

In order to reduce complexity for this project and based on our current requirements it seems like we would be able to fully deliver our feature just using the “Appointment” resource. I was curious if that’s an unconventional approach or if there’s any pitfalls to use it without a “Schedule” and/or “Slot” resources

Hi @boogiecoco. - have you checked out the usage docs for both

Appointment

and

Schedule

? They give a pretty good overview of the full lifecycle of these resources, and related resources https://www.medplum.com/docs/api/fhir/resources/appointment?section=usage https://www.medplum.com/docs/api/fhir/resources/schedule?section=usage

Yes I've looked at the usage and that's made me feel more torn about whether we should implement the concept of 'Slots' and a 'Schedule' for our use case. After speaking with your team it sounds like it's not recommended to use Appointments without including the concept of slots, even if those slots are static and we were planning on handling overlaps/conflicts with UI validations. Do you have an example of how slots, appointment, and schedule work together. Also is the bot required or would it make things easier ?

This is all based on a limited understanding of the use case . The last thing I'd want to do is overcomplicate your build 😅 However, given your emphasis on availability management, Schedule and Slots seem prudent

Sent you a DM to see if we can iron out details a little more !

We don't have any fantastic code examples in our docs, but on the main FHIR pages: - http://hl7.org/fhir/R4/schedule-example.json.html slots - http://hl7.org/fhir/R4/slot-example.json.html - http://hl7.org/fhir/R4/slot-example-busy.json.html appointments - http://hl7.org/fhir/R4B/appointment-example-request.json.html

If we are to use 'Slots' would it be reasonable to treat each day as a single slot to start off in order to keep things simple? (8am to 8pm) for a single day is a slot. Just to reduce initial complexity when it comes to our feature.

We just add ed a bit more information on our docs: https://www.medplum.com/docs/scheduling