Representation of sub-specialties in the HPD format

[James Derrickson]

HPD users have expressed interest in collecting sub-specialty information.  In the current HPD data model can subspecialty be reflected? Are there plans to add sub specialty information to the HPD format?

The American Board of Medical Specialties list the approved specialty and subspecialty certificates:  http://www.abms.org/who_we_help/physicians/specialties.aspx 

[Greg Carver]

I would think you should just use multiple hcSpecialisation attributes on provider & organization as needed.  It's 0..n isn't it?  It doesn't seem strictly necessary to create a sub-specialty field in the schema.

If a particular consumer wants to categorize specializations into hierarchies for display or search, that's it's choice, but the effort would fall on the consumer software.

On Fri, Jun 20, 2014 at 9:16 AM, James Derrickson <jfderr...@gmail.com> wrote:

HPD users have expressed interest in collecting sub-specialty information.  In the current HPD data model can subspecialty be reflected? Are there plans to add sub specialty information to the HPD format?

The American Board of Medical Specialties list the approved specialty and subspecialty certificates:  http://www.abms.org/who_we_help/physicians/specialties.aspx 

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[Gary Teichrow]

+1 on Greg's comments.

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[James Derrickson]

I have seen this request originate from multiple sources and expressed in different ways. 

It would be incorrect to group a sub-specialty as an nth specialty because there are officially recognized "sub-specialties".  So technically, a sub-specialty is not a specialty.  

There are also use cases to list providers by "area of interest" for consumers of healthcare and healthcare data analysis.  This is another attribute that influences patient care and is considered important determiner of quality of care.  Are there plans to expand the HPD standard for more granularity?

[Greg Carver]

I would argue that you're asking too much that HPD incorporate a sub-specialty attribute.  On the surface you're "only" asking for a sub specialty, but today's sub-specialty is tomorrows general-specialty with 5 sub-variants.  And the fact is that today's specialty terminologies are already deeply hierarchical.  Any such differentiation today is an artificial construct.

I further contend that such hierarchy is not so well suited for ldap anyway.  As evidence, the provider:org, and org:org relationship mappings are complicated enough without starting to squeeze more hierarchical concepts in there.

So I'm not aware of any plans to add this.  Could it be done?  Probably.  But I'm far from convinced it can't already be done with the schema as-is.  I believe clients that wish to do clever things with specialty hierarchies as you describe can easily take that task on themselves.  Basically the client can retrieve all specialties on the provider and map that to their specialty hierarchy tree... then you have everything you need to handle the hierarchy in your display.  You can display the tree directly, or extract just the leaf nodes and call those the sub-specialties.