A person who is directly or indirectly involved in the provisioning of healthcare or related services.

Need to track doctors, staff, locums etc. for both healthcare practitioners, funders, etc.

An identifier that applies to this person in this role.

Often, specific identities are assigned for the agent.

Whether this practitioner's record is in active use.

Need to be able to mark a practitioner record as not to be used because it was created in error.

If the practitioner is not in use by one organization, then it should mark the period on the PractitonerRole with an end date (even if they are active) as they may be active in another role.

The name(s) associated with the practitioner.

The name(s) that a Practitioner is known by. Where there are multiple, the name that the practitioner is usually known as should be used in the display.

The selection of the use property should ensure that there is a single usual name specified, and others use the nickname (alias), old, or other values as appropriate.

In general, select the value to be used in the ResourceReference.display based on this:

1. There is more than 1 name
2. Use = usual
3. Period is current to the date of the usage
4. Use = official
5. Other order as decided by internal business rules.

A contact detail for the practitioner, e.g. a telephone number or an email address.

Need to know how to reach a practitioner independent to any roles the practitioner may have.

Person may have multiple ways to be contacted with different uses or applicable periods. May need to have options for contacting the person urgently and to help with identification. These typically will have home numbers, or mobile numbers that are not role specific.

Administrative Gender - the gender that the person is considered to have for administration and record keeping purposes.

Needed to address the person correctly.

The date of birth for the practitioner.

Needed for identification.

Indicates if the practitioner is deceased or not.

If there's no value in the instance, it means there is no statement on whether or not the practitioner is deceased. Most systems will interpret the absence of a value as a sign of the person being alive.

Address(es) of the practitioner that are not role specific (typically home address). Work addresses are not typically entered in this property as they are usually role dependent.

The home/mailing address of the practitioner is often required for employee administration purposes, and also for some rostering services where the start point (practitioners home) can be used in calculations.

The PractitionerRole does not have an address value on it, as it is expected that the location property be used for this purpose (which has an address).

Image of the person.

Many EHR systems have the capability to capture an image of patients and personnel. Fits with newer social media usage too.

The official qualifications, certifications, accreditations, training, licenses (and other types of educations/skills/capabilities) that authorize or otherwise pertain to the provision of care by the practitioner.

For example, a medical license issued by a medical board of licensure authorizing the practitioner to practice medicine within a certain locality.

The PractitionerRole.specialty defines the functional role that they are practicing at a given organization or location. Those specialties may or might not require a qualification, and are not defined on the practitioner.

An identifier that applies to this person's qualification.

Often, specific identities are assigned for the qualification.

Coded representation of the qualification.

Qualifications often take time to attain and might be tracked during this time, and completed qualifications might not always be valid. This status concept has some overlap with period and both should be considered together. Refer to the descriptions of the codes for how the period should be interpreted.

If a qualification is revoked or otherwise cancelled, then the period is likely to be ignored, and m be related to when it was active.

Period during which the qualification is valid.

Qualifications are often for a limited period of time, and can be revoked.

Organization that regulates and issues the qualification.

A language which may be used to communicate with the practitioner, often for correspondence/administrative purposes.

The PractitionerRole.communication property should be used for publishing the languages that a practitioner is able to communicate with patients (on a per Organization/Role basis).

If no language is specified, this implies that the default local language is spoken. If you need to convey proficiency for multiple modes, then you need multiple Practitioner.Communication associations, using the patient-proficiency extension.

For animals, language is not a relevant field, and should be absent from the instance.

The language which may be used to communicate with the individual.

Most systems in multilingual countries will want to convey language. Not all systems actually need the regional dialect.

The language is commonly represented using the ISO-639-1 alpha code in lower case for the language, optionally followed by a hyphen and the ISO-3166-1 alpha code for the region in upper case. For example, "en" for English, or "en-US" for American English versus "en-AU" for Australian English, sgn-US for American Sign Language, sgn-NL for Dutch Sign Language, etc.

Not all systems actually code this but instead have it as free text. Hence CodeableConcept instead of code as the data type.

Indicates whether or not the person prefers this language (over other languages he masters up a certain level).

People that master multiple languages up to certain level may prefer one or more, i.e. feel more confident in communicating in a particular language making other languages sort of a fall back method.

This language is specifically identified for communicating directly with the practitioner (typically un-related to patient communications).