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Version: 3.0

Healthcare Service

A healthcare service is a named offering that a facility provides — cardiology, a laboratory, radiology, a pharmacy, an outpatient clinic. It is the "what we offer" catalog entry: the thing patients book into, the thing schedules attach to, and the link between a clinical activity and the part of the facility accountable for it.

What it represents​

In Care's FHIR-aligned model, a healthcare service maps to the HealthcareService resource. It captures:

  • Identity — a display name and free-text details describing the offering
  • Classification — a coded service type and an internal type that tells the platform how the service behaves
  • Placement — the locations within the facility where the service is delivered
  • Ownership — the managing organization (a department or team) accountable for running it

A healthcare service is a description of an offering, not an appointment and not a place. It says "this facility offers cardiology, run by the cardiology department, in these rooms" — but the act of seeing a patient is an encounter, and the room itself is a location. The service is the stable bridge that ties offering, owner, and place together; patients flow through it, but it outlives any single visit.

Classification​

A service carries two labels, and they answer different questions.

  • Service type — a coded value drawn from a standard service-type terminology (such as the HL7 service-type code system). This is the label a person recognizes: "Cardiology", "General Practice", "Diagnostic Imaging". It answers what kind of service is this?
  • Internal type — one of pharmacy, lab, scheduling, or store. This answers how should the platform treat this service? It wires the service into the matching workflow: pharmacy into medication dispensing, lab into diagnostics, scheduling into appointment booking, store into supply handling.

Read service type as the public-facing name and internal type as the behavioral switch that connects the service to the rest of Care.

How it connects​

A healthcare service is owned and placed, never free-floating:

  • It belongs to exactly one facility — the place that offers it — set automatically from context, never chosen by hand.
  • It is owned by one facility organization, the department or team accountable for it.
  • It is delivered across one or more locations, so a single service can span several rooms or wards.

Schedulable services are also what patients reserve time against, through schedules and bookings. The service stays put; the encounters and bookings move through it.

Permissions​

Access to healthcare services is governed by two facility-scoped permissions.

PermissionDescriptionSystem Roles
can_write_healthcare_serviceCreate, update, or delete a healthcare service on a facilityFacility Admin, Admin
can_read_healthcare_serviceView healthcare services offered at a facilityFacility Admin, Administrator, Admin, Staff, Doctor, Nurse, Volunteer, Pharmacist

Roles are granted through a user's membership in an organization or facility, and permissions cascade down the organization tree — a role held at a parent organization applies to the facilities and services beneath it.