Care Pathways

The care service owns the clinical journey after triage: turning a triage recommendation into real appointments, prescriptions and diagnostic referrals. It is where Olly stops being an insurer and starts coordinating care.

Field reference: full columns, types and nullability live in the catalog: glossary terms Episode, Appointment, ProviderSlot, Prescription, DiagnosticsReferral. This page is the narrative.

The journey

• Episode is a bounded course of care (a single clinical interaction or treatment course), opened from a triage Session's disposition. It carries a care_type and a status, and closes when the need is resolved. Everything else in the journey hangs off it.
• Appointment is a scheduled encounter between a member and a Provider, linked to an Episode and optionally a ProviderSlot, with a status and a telehealth link-out URL where applicable.
• ProviderSlot is a bookable window at a provider (AVAILABLE | BOOKED | CANCELLED). Booking an appointment flips the linked slot to BOOKED; cancelling restores AVAILABLE.
• Prescription records a medication issued by a provider within an episode.
• DiagnosticsReferral instructs a member to undergo tests (imaging, bloods); it records the referral type and target clinic and links to the resulting appointment once booked.

How it relates to the rest of the platform

The care domain is deliberately decoupled by locator: episodes, appointments, slots, prescriptions and referrals reference each other and the Provider and Party by *_locator text, not UUID foreign keys. This lets care evolve without cross-service FK coupling, at the cost of integrity being an application concern.

Invariants

• Appointments, prescriptions and diagnostics referrals each belong to exactly one Episode (by episode_locator).
• A booked appointment holds exactly one ProviderSlot; the slot↔appointment status is kept in lockstep (book → BOOKED, cancel → AVAILABLE).

Caveats

• care_type and the various status fields are free TEXT with no DB CHECK; the value sets are conventions, and may differ from the OpenAPI enums.
• All cross-entity links are locator (text) references, not FKs; there is no database-level referential integrity between care entities or to providers/parties.