Relationship between Appointments and Encounters

[Jeff Walters]

I'm trying to understand some of the relationships that are available from a FHIR API data perspective. Is there a relationship between appointment and encounter? I've been told that Cerner is a encounter driven application, so maybe the relationship to the appointment doesn't exist.

I did a little research with the FHIR API. If I get all of the appointments for a location on a particular date, then I can retrieve a patient listing for that location. From this data I can get the practitioner(s) ID's and patient ID for each appointment, but I can't determine the encounter(s) related to that appointment. If I search encounters by patient ID, it doesn't seem to provide the link back to the appointment. So, it's difficult to determine the true relationship between appointment and encounter. Am I missing something?

Thank you,

Jeff Walters

[Richard Leaf (Cerner)]

Hi Jeff,

The Appointment/Encounter relationship model is implemented differently in FHIR than it is in Cerner Millennium.  In Millennium the link is stored with the appointment, and FHIR has the linking stored on the encounter.  FHIR also only supports a single appointment per encounter, while Millennium can have multiple appointments attached to a single encounter (but an appointment will only be linked to one encounter).

Adding to what you are seeing is that we do not yet have an endpoint on the registration side (which owns the encounter) to link an encounter when an appointment is created. I know work is planned to support this but I do not have visibility to the timeline on it.

Richard Leaf, RHIA

Solution Designer, Scheduling Services Dev

Cerner Corporation | www.cerner.com

[Maqbool Patel]

I am also looking on to the same issue. Is this available now? I am also trying to get to encounters from appointments. 

Thanks.

[Jenni Syed (Cerner)]

Hi,

No, this is not available. You can see what is available on https://fhir.cerner.com.

Regards,

Jenni

[Gayathri Nagaraj]

Hi,

Is this still not available?

Thanks,

Gayathri

[Benjamin Eichhorn (Cerner)]

Hi Gayathri,

As Jenni has mentioned, this is not available. Please see https://fhir.cerner.com to view the functionality we provide.

Thanks,

Ben (Cerner)

[Arjun Guna]

Can we have one encounter without no appointments( walk-ins)? Please help me with the relationships between  appointment:encounter 

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[Amar Bulsara]

I am curious to understand this relationship as it relates to the FHIR standards.  If an appointment is created using the FHIR Appointment Resource, when does the Encounter get associated to that appointment?  From what I can tell, it does not get associated even if we make a Patch request to the FHIR Appointment to either "Arrive" or "Checked-in" the patient.  This is a bit convoluted because when user, who is logged into cerner wants to start a video visit, the JWT token only provides the EncounterId and Patient Person ID.

How do we make the relationship?

Amar

[Amar Bulsara]

Hello Cerner Team,

Is there any guidance on the question raised?

[Fenil Desani (Cerner)]

Hello,

This capability of immediately associating an Encounter to an Appointment, created using FHIR APIs is yet not available but maybe in the future.

In the interim, you can work with the Health Systems directly to setup Ops jobs which creates Encounter for newly created Appointments on a scheduled basis.

Thanks,

Fenil