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type: resourceresource: Slot

Slot

Introduction

Scope and Usage

Slot resources are used to provide time-slots that can be booked using an appointment. They do not provide any information about appointments that are available, just the time, and optionally what the time can be used for. These are effectively spaces of free/busy time.
Slots can also be marked as busy without having appointments associated.

A slot can have more than one appointment allocated to it. A scheduling system may permit multiple allocations up to a specific number of places. An example of this type of usage could be where the slot is being used for a group service that permits 5 participants at the same time.

A slot can be marked as over-booked indicating that there are too many appointments allocated to it.

In some situations a service may have a specific set of slots reserved for specific uses, such as "walk-ins" or a specific organization has a "standing booking" for Thursday mornings. These should be represented using the appointmentType field with a specified and agreed value.
Security Permissions or specific business rules on the system could enforce that only eligible appointments are allocated to them.

If a service had a weekly schedule created that permitted eight 1 hour appointments each day of a working week (Monday - Friday), this would be constructed by a single Schedule resource with the dates for the start and end of the week set, and then 40 (5x8) Slot resources associated with it.
As appointments fill up the schedule, these slots would individually be marked as busy as the appointments are filled into the slots.
The slots in a schedule do not need to be the same size, and can be different for different days of the week.

Slot instances do not have any recurrence information included. If recurring information is desired, this will be managed outside these resources, or included as extensions.

Note that booking an appointment does not necessarily require that slot resources be identified. When attempting to book an appointment, if the requestor knows ahead of time which schedulable resources are required, then identifying individual slots from the resources' schedules prior to creating the appointment is appropriate. However, in some medical scheduling scenarios, determining which resources are required for an appointment is very complex, and options other than using schedule+slot may be a better solution.

Boundaries and Relationships

Slot: Provides the granular, bookable units within the Schedule.

Schedule: Defines the broader availability and context for an individual or service.

Appointment: Is the outcome of a scheduling process. That scheduling process may involve consulting Slot and Schedule resources, or it may be the result of other processes.

Notes

Notes:

There is a strong desire that implementers of this resource should consider providing the resource in the iCalendar format as an alternative representation. Many 3rd party applications and component providers have parsers and user interface controls to display this information. This may lower the entry point to integrate outside the health-care specific applications, and into the consumer space. This would permit the easier creation of a mobile application that creates appointments in the devices native calendar.
The iCalendar specification can be found at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt.

StructureDefinition

Elements (Simplified)

Mappings

Resource Packs

list-Slot-packs.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<List xmlns="http://hl7.org/fhir">
  <id value="Slot-packs"/>
  <status value="current"/>
  <mode value="working"/>
</List>

Search Parameters

Full Search Parameters

Examples

Full Examples

Mapping Exceptions

slot-fivews-mapping-exceptions.xml

Unmapped Elements