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  1. FHIR Specification Feedback
  2. FHIR-38806

Update Coverage.period to be 0..*

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    • Icon: Change Request Change Request
    • Resolution: Unresolved
    • Icon: Medium Medium

    Description

      When working with coverage effective dates, there are two ways of looking at it:

      1. What is the objective truth of when a coverage is effective?  This will normally be a single period.
      2. What do end users and billing systems actually know about when the coverages are effective? 

      While there is usually (always?) a single effective period for a coverage from an "objective truth" perspective, often the end users or billing systems where coverage information is collected don't have the knowledge of that objective truth.  This leads to real-world practices where users document multiple effective periods for a coverage, where those periods are fragments of the "objective truth".

       

      I propose updating coverage.period to be 0..* so that billing systems can communicate the fragments of the effective period that they know about.

       

      This is very much a practical request rather than a theoretical modeling one.  But in order to interoperate real-world data, I think we need the enable the practical exchange here.

       

      The payer can always validate that all the "fragment" periods are within the overall effective period the payer knows about, if the Coverage is communicated to the payer from the billing system.

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            cooper.thompson Cooper Thompson
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              Updated: