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Official URL: http://example.org/ImplementationGuide/patient.scheduling Version: 0.1.0
Draft as of 2025-12-23 Computable Name: PatientScheduling

Introduction

This FHIR Implementation Guide (IG) was developed as a contribution to the Patient Scheduling track in preparation for the January 2026 HL7 FHIR Connectathon 41.

The guide explores how modern FHIR-based workflows can better support patient- and caregiver-facing scheduling experiences, with a particular focus on coordination across discovery, booking, and downstream logistics.

Scope and purpose

This IG is intentionally aspirational. Rather than defining a single prescribed implementation, it documents a set of interoperable use cases and modeling patterns that aim to streamline the end-to-end patient scheduling journey, including:

  • discovering appropriate providers and services
  • identifying mutually available time slots
  • booking or manually recording appointments
  • coordinating tasks among patients, caregivers, and applications
  • supporting logistics such as transportation and pre-visit preparation

The guide is designed to align with and extend emerging efforts such as SMART Scheduling Links, while remaining flexible enough to support manual workflows and incremental adoption.

Use cases

The following use cases describe the core scheduling and coordination scenarios addressed by this IG:

Use case What it enables
Provider discovery Find providers based on specialty, location, language, availability, and other constraints
Calendar sync Discover and reconcile available appointment slots across providers, patients, and caregivers
Appointments Capture booked or manually created appointments as the anchor for coordination workflows
Task assignment Assign and track scheduling-related tasks among patients, caregivers, and applications
Transportation Coordinate transportation to and from appointments based on appointment context

Architectural approach

Across these use cases, the IG emphasizes a small set of core principles:

  • Appointments as coordination anchors
    Appointments represent the central object around which downstream activities (transportation, forms, caregiver actions) are coordinated, regardless of how the appointment was created.

  • Tasks for orchestration and accountability
    Scheduling-related work (booking attempts, transportation arrangement, form completion) is modeled using Task resources to enable assignment, tracking, and outcome capture.

  • SMART-compatible, not SMART-dependent
    Where available, published schedules and slots (e.g., via SMART Scheduling Links) are leveraged. Where not available, manual entry and local coordination remain fully supported.

  • Patient- and caregiver-facing first
    The modeling choices reflect the needs of consumer-facing applications, while remaining compatible with provider systems and future integrations.

What this IG does not attempt to solve

This guide does not attempt to standardize:

  • billing or claims workflows
  • clinical documentation beyond scheduling context
  • transportation vendor APIs or contracting models
  • full EHR portal authentication or authorization flows

Those concerns are intentionally out of scope to keep the focus on interoperable scheduling and coordination patterns.

Audience

This IG is intended for:

  • FHIR implementers exploring patient-facing scheduling workflows
  • SMART Scheduling Links contributors and adopters
  • application developers building caregiver or consumer health tools
  • standards contributors interested in coordination-oriented modeling