Identifier(s) by which this encounter is known.

planned | arrived | triaged | in-progress | onleave | finished | cancelled +.

Note that internal business rules will detemine the appropraite transitions that may occur between statuses (and also classes).

This element is labeled as a modifier because the status contains codes that mark the encounter as not currently valid.

The status history permits the encounter resource to contain the status history without needing to read through the historical versions of the resource, or even have the server store them.

The current status is always found in the current version of the resource, not the status history.

inpatient | outpatient | ambulatory | emergency +.

The class history permits the tracking of the encounters transitions without needing to go through the resource history.

This would be used for a case where an admission starts of as an emergency encounter, then transisions into an inpatient scenario. Doing this and not restarting a new encounter ensures that any lab/diagnostic results can more easily follow the patient and not require re-processing and not get lost or cancelled during a kindof discharge from emergency to inpatient.

Specific type of encounter (e.g. e-mail consultation, surgical day-care, skilled nursing, rehabilitation).

Since there are many ways to further classify encounters, this element is 0..*.

Indicates the urgency of the encounter.

The patient ro group present at the encounter.

While the encounter is always about the patient, the patient may not actually be known in all contexts of use, and there may be a group of patients that could be anonymous (such as in a group therapy for Alcoholics Anonymous - where the recording of the encounter could be used for billing on the number of people/staff and not important to the context of the specific patients) or alternately in veterinary care a herd of sheep receiving treatment (where the animals are not individually tracked).

Where a specific encounter should be classified as a part of a specific episode(s) of care this field should be used. This association can facilitate grouping of related encounters together for a specific purpose, such as government reporting, issue tracking, association via a common problem. The association is recorded on the encounter as these are typically created after the episode of care, and grouped on entry rather than editing the episode of care to append another encounter to it (the episode of care could span years).

The referral request this encounter satisfies (incoming referral).

The list of people responsible for providing the service.

The appointment that scheduled this encounter.

The start and end time of the encounter.

If not (yet) known, the end of the Period may be omitted.

Quantity of time the encounter lasted. This excludes the time during leaves of absence.

May differ from the time the Encounter.period lasted because of leave of absence.

Reason the encounter takes place, expressed as a code. For admissions, this can be used for a coded admission diagnosis.

For systems that need to know which was the primary diagnosis, these will be marked with the standard extension primaryDiagnosis (which is a sequence value rather than a flag, 1 = primary diagnosis).

The list of diagnosis relevant to this encounter.

The set of accounts that may be used for billing for this Encounter.

The billing system may choose to allocate billable items associated with the Encounter to different referenced Accounts based on internal business rules.

Details about the admission to a healthcare service.

An Encounter may cover more than just the inpatient stay. Contexts such as outpatients, community clinics, and aged care facilities are also included.

The duration recorded in the period of this encounter covers the entire scope of this hospitalization record.

List of locations where the patient has been during this encounter.

Virtual encounters can be recorded in the Encounter by specifying a location reference to a location of type "kind" such as "client's home" and an encounter.class = "virtual".

An organization that is in charge of maintaining the information of this Encounter (e.g. who maintains the report or the master service catalog item, etc.). This MAY be the same as the organization on the Patient record, however it could be different. This MAY not be not the Service Delivery Location's Organization.

Another Encounter of which this encounter is a part of (administratively or in time).

This is also used for associating a child's encounter back to the mother's encounter.

Refer to the Notes section in the Patient resource for further details.