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Practitioner and PracitionerRole

The VistA New Person file (200) contains data about staff in a form usable by CPRS functionality, usually as a record of who provided care at a given encounter.

FHIR distinguishes between a Practitioner, a person with a name, address, identifier (e.g., NPI), and qualifications, and a PractitionerRole, with a Practitioner, a specialty and an organization. In most places where a FHIR resource references one of these target resources, it allows a reference to either. The PractitionerRole references a Practitioner, so in cases where we wish to know name and specialty, we have both resources, and the source (e.g., Encounter) should point at the PractitionerRole, from which we can navigate to a Practitioner.