A formally or informally recognized grouping of people or organizations formed for the purpose of achieving some form of collective action. Includes companies, institutions, corporations, departments, community groups, healthcare practice groups, etc.

Identifier for the organization that is used to identify the organization across multiple disparate systems.

Organizations are known by a variety of ids. Some institutions maintain several, and most collect identifiers for exchange with other organizations concerning the organization.

Whether the organization's record is still in active use.

Need a flag to indicate a record is no longer to be used and should generally be hidden for the user in the UI.

Default is true.

This active flag is not intended to be used to mark an organizations as temporarily closed or under construction. Instead the Location(s) within the Organization should have the suspended status. If further details of the reason for the suspension are required, then an extension on this element should be used.

The kind of organization that this is.

Need to be able to track the kind of organization that this is - different organization types have different uses.

Organizations can be corporations, wards, sections, clinical teams, government departments, etc. Note that code is generally a classifier of the type of organization; in many applications, codes are used to identity a particular organization (say, ward) as opposed to another of the same type - these are identifiers, not codes.

A name associated with the organization.

Need to use the name as the label of the organization.

If the name of an organization changes, consider putting the old name in the alias column so that it can still be located through searches.

A list of alternate names that the organization is known as, or was known as in the past.

Over time locations and organizations go through many changes and can be known by different names.

For searching knowing previous names that the location was known by can be very useful.

There are no dates associated with the alias/historic names, as this is not intended to track when names were used, but to assist in searching so that older names can still result in identifying the organization.

A contact detail for the organization.

Human contact for the organization.

The use code home is not to be used. Note that these contacts are not the contact details of people who are employed by or represent the organization, but official contacts for the organization itself.

An address for the organization.

May need to keep track of the organization's addresses for contacting, billing or reporting requirements.

Organization may have multiple addresses with different uses or applicable periods. The use code home is not to be used.

The organization of which this organization forms a part.

Need to be able to track the hierarchy of organizations within an organization.

Contact for the organization for a certain purpose.

Need to keep track of assigned contact points within bigger organization.

Where multiple contacts for the same purpose are provided there is a standard extension that can be used to determine which one is the preferred contact to use.

Indicates a purpose for which the contact can be reached.

Need to distinguish between multiple contact persons.

A name associated with the contact.

Need to be able to track the person by name.

A contact detail (e.g. a telephone number or an email address) by which the party may be contacted.

People have (primary) ways to contact them in some way such as phone, email.

Visiting or postal addresses for the contact.

May need to keep track of a contact party's address for contacting, billing or reporting requirements.

Technical endpoints providing access to services operated for the organization.

Organizations have multiple systems that provide various services and need to be able to define the technical connection details for how to connect to them, and for what purpose.