In the resource definition of a practitioner (http://hl7.org/implement/standards/fhir/practitioner.htm), only one address can be set.
These is a problem for managing physicians with a national identifier (RPPS in France). A physician can have several addresses, they can work in a public hospital and a private organization in the same time, for instance. Some physicians have more than 10 active addresses.
How to deal with that ?
Thanks in advance.
If you only want to have a single resource, you can also use extensions to send additional address repetitions (or any other element you need or don't have enough repetitions for in the core resource). The premise for only allowing 1 reptition in the "core" resource is that the majority of systems will only support one, so we didn't want to try forcing multiple repetitions. But with extensions, you're in no way limited to the cardinality indicated.
In the near future (though probably after the publication of the first DSTU), we'll probably go through all the resources and identify elements with maxOccurs=1 where it would theoretically be possible to have more than one and define standard extensions for sending extra repetitions (just so everyone who encounters this common use-case has a standard extension to rely on)
It is perfectly alright to have more than one Practitioner instance for every role an individual physician can perform. So, you get one Practitioner instance for the professional working in his role within a public hospital, one for that same person working in a private organization etcetera.
For each instance you can give the practitioner qualifications for that specific role, specify a period the professional is allowed to be in that role, give telecom details specific to that role etcetera.
See also the last paragraph in the Practitioner resource
Practitioner performs different roles within the same or even different organizations. Depending on jurisdiction and custom, it may be necessary to maintain a specific Practitioner Resource for each such role or have a single Practitioner with multiple roles. The role can be limited to a specific period, after which authorization for this role ends. Note that the represented organization need not necessarily be the (direct) employer of a Practitioner.
