As more and more countries adopt an abstract way of expressing a drug prescription, specifying the active ingredient, dosage, route, rather than selecting a branded or generic drug, it becomes necessary to be able to specify some drug characteristics requested by the prescriber, such as kinetics or some other characteristic. 

Example: The prescriber prescribes "tramadol, prolonged release, 100 mg BID, oral route", leaving the choice of a particular dose form (tablet, capsule, …) up to the pharmacist. 

Today, "prolonged release" cannot be specified per se, neither in MedicationRequest nor in the instance of Medication, which can be referenced by the MedicationRequest.

Hence the change requested below:

Add "drugCharacteristic" 0..* to Medication, ans a BackboneElement defined as "a characteristic of the medication", with these two child elements:

• type         1..1    CodeableConcept         a code specifying the type of characteristic
• value[x]    1..1                                         value of the characteristic
  • valueCodeableConcept
  • valueString
  • valueQuantity
  • valueDuration
  • valueBase64Binary
  • valueAttachment
  • valueBoolean

This Jira is spawned by this zulip discussion:

https://chat.fhir.org/#narrow/stream/179249-Medication/topic/prescribe.20with.20kinetics.20and.20no.20dose.20form