Appointment

Definition

A record describing the plan for a future, scheduled encounter. The appointment describes the plan for the encounter, not what actually happens in the encounter, apart from capturing whether the patient arrives and/or completes the encounter.

Purpose

Often used in analyses of clinical operations, e.g., to identify cancellation or no-show rates, or to project future resource needs. Used in the Ursa Health Clinical Operations module.

Related Objects

• Appointments
  • Appointments, Precursor 1 (All Source Records)
• EMR Encounters
• Providers

Detailed Narrative of Logic

• Appointment records from all contributing source systems, having been mastered and conformed to the appropriate semantic and structural standards as necessary, are collected in Appointments, Precursor 1 (All Source Records).
• The natural object Appointments then removes source system records flagged as deleted or with duplicate identifier values – keeping the record with the most recent Last Updated Datetime value – and generates a Document ID value for each remaining record (with document type token APT).
• If a record is missing its Service Provider Description, a replacement value is obtained, if possible, from the Provider Description field on Providers, using the original record’s Service Provider ID as the lookup value. The same approach is also used to obtain replacement Provider Group Description values.
• When the appointment leads to an encounter, Appointments allows linking to the resulting encounter record via EMR Encounter ID (which links to EMR Encounters).
• Note that, while Appointments and EMR Encounters share a number of fields about the encounter (e.g., Encounter Type Description), the Appointments fields represent information associated with the appointment record, not necessarily what actually took place in the encounter. So a scheduled appointment for a home health visit that actually resulted in a telehealth encounter should produce different Encounter Type Description values between Appointments and EMR Encounters; similarly, an appointment for a home health visit that never resulted in any encounter would still be identified as a home health visit appointment in Appointments.