[Tagging] Doctors in a joint practice

Joseph Eisenberg joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com
Wed Dec 30 05:39:14 UTC 2020


In my area most doctor's practices are joint or larger groups, since it is
quite a pain to run a solo practice in the USA, what with our mess of
different health insurance options.

Currently there is a tag in use for the number of doctors on staff in a
hospital: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/staff_count%3Adoctors
staff_count:doctors - and a similar tag staff_count:nurses - though it is
rather long-winded. Just using "doctors=<number>" seems fine to me.

However, you might want to consider how to tag nurse practitioners and
physician assistants, if those "mid-level practitioners" are present in
your area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-level_practitioner - are you
going to include them in the count of doctors, along with physicians, or
count them seprately?

-- Joseph Eisenberg

On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 5:42 PM Stefan Tauner <stefan.tauner at gmx.at> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> apparently we don't have a documented way to tag joint practices, i.e.,
> doctor's offices that are shared between multiple physicians.
> amenity=doctors mentions that is should be used to such occasions
> ("These range from a single doctor's office to larger establishments.")
> This is missing from the otherwise verbose healthcare tags.
> There even has been some "documentation" on the size that has been
> removed because it was inadequate:
>
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Tag:amenity%3Ddoctors&diff=prev&oldid=1944262
> The (abandoned) healthcare 2.0 proposal mentions them and offers an
> intricate solution with health_person:type in a relation...
>
> There is an alternative to tag this in the form of
> amenity/healthcare=clinic but the healthcare=clinic's page states "When
> tagging, you may wish to consider using amenity=doctors instead if the
> practice is small, with perhaps only 1 to 10 staff."
> Also, I don't think it would be too wise to introduce another
> amenity/healthcare value for that. These establishments are not that
> different to doctor's offices with a single physician for the most part
> (legal matters are a bit more delicate but we don't map those in too
> much detail ;)
>
> However, I really think we should introduce/document a proper way to
> tag such joint practices. In Austria there are often <5 doctors that
> sometimes only share the receptions. Sometimes they don't have a common
> proper name but often they do and then I would like to tag this
> explicitly.
> What I currently do is to use name=whatever_they_call_their_venture and
> add the individual doctors' names comma-separated in the operator tag
> (which I usually not use for doctor's offices because it would be equal
> to the name tag).
> Please post existing examples in the database if you know about them.
>
>
> Any suggestions how to additionally explicitly tag them as joint
> practice? Using the doctors key seems reasonable. That is more or less
> unused (some 40 times it is (mis)used to tag specialities; a handful
> times it gives a number... probably of doctors?).
> We could define a special value for the doctors key (e.g.,
> joint_practice) or define it as the number of physicians to be found
> there. The former does only make sense if there are other useful values
> which I cant think of.
>
> Thus my proposition is to document the doctors value as the number of
> physicians in case it is a joint practice (or optionally 1 to indicate
> that it is not) and adding their names as comma-separated operator
> value.
>
> --
> Kind regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Stefan Tauner
>
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