Patient scheduling remains a significant friction point in healthcare delivery. Patients frequently experience fragmented scheduling processes, requiring multiple phone calls to find available appointments, lacking visibility into real-time provider availability, and navigating disconnected systems across different care settings. Administrative staff spend considerable time managing scheduling workflows that don't communicate across platforms, leading to inefficiencies, missed appointments, and delayed care. The absence of standardized, interoperable scheduling data prevents the seamless care navigation experiences that patients expect in other industries. A clear consensus has emerged around the need for interoperable appointment scheduling capabilities. There is growing momentum for requirements that health systems and vendors expose real-time provider availability and appointment slots via standard APIs. This work-stream advances a bulk publish approach to make scheduling data broadly available. By enabling health systems to publish provider availability, location information, and appointment slot data in bulk formats, third-party applications, care navigation tools, and digital front doors can access comprehensive scheduling information without repeatedly querying individual systems. This approach reduces system load while enabling innovative scheduling solutions to aggregate data across multiple providers and organizations. Building on the existing SMART Scheduling Links Implementation Guide, this work adds critical FHIR resources to support richer scheduling workflows. These additions enable representation of provider specialties, locations, appointment types, prerequisites, and other metadata necessary for intelligent care navigation. The enhanced IG supports unified digital front doors that aggregate scheduling slots alongside and enables AI-assisted workflows where systems can present: 'Dr. Smith is a high-quality, in-network provider in your accountable care organization with availability next Tuesday. Would you like me to help you schedule an appointment?'
Proposed path for this publication should usually be the canonical with the version or sequence appended and then some kind of label (typically '-snapshot')
Unable to compare with previous version: Unable to find version history at http://hl7.org/fhir/uv/smart-scheduling-links (Problem #1 with package-list.json at http://hl7.org/fhir/uv/smart-scheduling-links: Not Found)
IPA Comparison:
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IPS Comparison:
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Validation Flags:
On: autoLoad; Off: hintAboutNonMustSupport, anyExtensionsAllowed, checkAggregation, showReferenceMessages, noExperimentalContent, displayWarnings
The extension http://hl7.org/fhir/StructureDefinition/elementdefinition-maxValueSet|5.2.0 is deprecated (1 uses)
Suppress per FMG QA Review on 3/24/26. Need to address later.
INFORMATION: en/StructureDefinition-smart-scheduling-location.html: The html source contains the word 'SHOULD' but it is not in a text phrase marked as a conformance clause: 'If a PractitionerRole or Location is associated with organization-specific identifiers (such as facility numbers, site codes, or store numbers), publishers SHOULD include these. The system should be a URL that identifies the identifier system, preferably a page on the publisher's web site (e.g. {"system": "https://healthsystem.example.com/facility-directory", "value": "FAC-123"})' (1 uses)
INFORMATION: en/StructureDefinition-smart-scheduling-slot.html: The html source contains the word 'MAY' but it is not in a text phrase marked as a conformance clause: ' Each line of the Slot File is a minified JSON object that conveys information about an appointment slot. Publishers are encouraged to represent slots with fine-grained timing details (e.g. representing appointments at specific times of the day), but MAY represent slots with coarse grained timing (e.g., "between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m." or "between noon and five p.m."). ' (1 uses)
INFORMATION: en/specification.html: The html source contains the word 'SHOULD' but it is not in a text phrase marked as a conformance clause: 'Slot Files. Each line contains a minified JSON object representing an appointment slot (busy or free) for a healthcare service at a specific location. Details on JSON structure Example file showing coarse-grained slots for a single week, across all twenty "SMART Medicine" sites. (Note: The choice to break down slots into weekly files is arbitrary; the fictional Clinic could instead choose to host a single slot file, or produce location-specific files, or even group slots randomly.) Slots MAY include only coarse-grained timing (indicating they fall sometime beetween 9a and 6p ET, the clinic's fictional hours of operation). Ideally, Slot Publishers SHOULD provide finer-grained slot information with specific timing. ' (1 uses)
hl7.fhir.uv.smart-scheduling-links
hl7.fhir.uv.tools.r4