MedicationOrder for Times of day

Question

I have a very similar question to:

Defining a Medication Schedule in FHIR DSTU2

I want to show a MedicationOrder for specified times of day, like:

Take every day at 9:00am, 1:00pm and 6:00pm for 7 days.

I am not sure if I should have multiple dosageInstructions one for each time. Or if I should have multiple timing instructions each with its own event dateTime. Or if there is another way I am not considering.

Thanks!

Answer 1

There's not currently a way to specify specific times without enumerating the complete set of date-time combinations. However, an extension could be defined on Timing.repeat to convey the specific times - so you'd say "3 times a day for 7 days" using the core structure and then enumerate the specific occurrence times. Feel free to submit a change request to make this a core extension. (And if you wish, make an argument that most systems supporting timing would support this capability and thus it should be a core element rather than an extension.)

Answer 2

I suggested in my change request (see link below) to do it this way:

"dosageInstruction": [{
          "text": "Take 4 tablets daily for 7 days starting January 16, 2015",
          "timing": {                           
              "repeat": {    
                  "boundsPeriod": {
                    "start": "2015-01-16",
                        "end": "2015-01-20"
                  }                        
                "timesOfDay":{   //<-- List of times - here is where the times would be for every period 
                    "06:00",
                    "17:00",
                    "21:00"    
                }
            }    

change request:

http://gforge.hl7.org/gf/project/fhir/tracker/?action=TrackerItemEdit&tracker_item_id=12352