Talk:Key:healthcare

Med research lab

I'm a newbie looking for the correct tagging for a medical testing laboratory. This proposed healthcare key has the potential to be very comprehensive.

"replaces"

It is incorrect to say that "healthcare=dentist replaces amenity=dentist". There are 30k amenity=dentist and <900 healthcare=dentist.

The wiki is supposed to document how people map things, not describe a schema that the author of a particular page would like to see adopted (but that hardly no-one has yet). --SomeoneElse (talk) 10:34, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

... and that's now been resolved by a page edit by User:Mateusz_Konieczny. Thanks Mateusz! --SomeoneElse (talk) 13:05, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

name: Can we include Dr in it?

For example in France we always say "Dr Jane Doe" and there is almost always a plate with that written.

In Germany, the title is part of the name, and depends on having a PhD or not. As there are now quite a lot physicians that have not done the PhD, it cannot be included universally. --Polarbear w (talk) 15:47, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

There are a few common misunderstandings in this answer: "Doktor" is an academic degree in Germany, not a title. It isn't part of the name, it may be an addition to a name though, but it's not a part of the name. The English "PhD" (Doctor of Philosophy) is not a translation of the German "Doktor". In addition, German physicians rarely have a degree at the level of a PhD. If anything, they typically have a "Dr. med." degree which is similar to "M.D." (Doctor of Medicine) in the U.S. of A. To answer the original question: If "Dr" is included in the displayed name, then it can (and perhaps should) be added. If "Dr." is not included, then not, and in doubt "no". We map what we see. --Freetz (talk) 21:00, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

JOSM preset

Hi, I started an draft to add this tags to the JOSM editor: https://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Presets/Healthcare --!i! 07:41, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

you could naturally not reinvent the wheel and use what has already been done for https://github.com/simonpoole/beautified-JOSM-preset SimonPoole (talk) 09:33, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

This is not about reinventing the wheel. As we discussed at the forum your presets are pretty nice , but not listed within JOSM, nor found by google nor mentioned at the JOSM healthcare ticket. It's good to know, that there are different approaches to extend JOSM, but in the end we all want to encourage other mappers to make use of this schema. Just another tool, doesn't hurt anybody :) --!i! 17:06, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

Naturally they are found by google (in the top 10 results) and in the diaries and weekly OSM and twitter and .... SimonPoole (talk) 18:12, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

Google results are different for everyone so you are both right. (It's likely that pages Google knows one already viewed would get a higher ranking) Tuxayo (talk) 18:33, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

healthcare: hospice and other nursing facilities

Hi, could you please give some more detailes on your recent edit on the voted healthcare=* page? --!i! 21:40, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

If you look closely, the approved proposal from 2010 did not contain hospice, thus this value was not voted on. It was inserted on 19 May 2017‎ by Jotam. I checked and found that there was no discussion about it on this talk page, and I am not aware of any discussion on the tagging list. As all other values for the healthcare key are therapeutic approaches, hospice does not fit. Also regular nursing homes would not fit. As documented, there is a better approach for hospices under the social_facilities category. --Polarbear w (talk) 23:56, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for this explanation. To avoid any conflicts, I recommend to remove this entry completely and ref to this disc at the edit comment.

We already linked to social facilities at the template and See also section, as both topics are closely related :) --!i! 09:06, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

Will do. I might also write a differentiation section, similar to this one.--Polarbear w (talk) 10:05, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

Differentiation between therapeutic and caring facilities

Following the discussion about hospices, I propose to add a clear differentiation that the healthcare key, as it was approved, focuses on the therapeutic professions, and excludes nursing care. While of course a nursing home is visited by a general physician (healthcare=doctor), and a hospice by a physician specialised in palliative medicine (healthcare:speciality=palliative), the purpose of the facility is caring. In some countries there is a legal distinction for therapeutic professions (e.g. Germany: Heilberuf on Wikipedia), thus this key should follow this distinction. For the care facilities, there is an established tagging scheme as amenity=social_facility + social_facility=nursing_home or social_facility=hospice.--Polarbear w (talk) 10:37, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

new values that are in use

Hi, as the years are passing by, the community makes use of the healthcare namespace and invented new values. Taginfo lists for example:

• healthcare=laboratory
• healthcare=pharmacy
• ...

While I'm personally pretty ok to add this values to get an unified+more complete schema (like power=*), I'm not sure how others think about this extensions? If the values are used significantly in the wild, does we need any further discussion? Are there conflicts with other schemas? --!i! 18:23, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Adding values is a natural thing in OSM, however the definition should limit the scope so it does not get diluted. Laboratory and pharmacy fit in the therapeutic scope as said in the section above, so in my opinion that would be a good bracket. --Polarbear w (talk) 19:07, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

migrate legacy from amenities

Hello, to come the goal of an unfied namespace closer step-by-step, I would like to ask, how we deal with legacy values currently and in mid-term. My idea is to softly migrate to healthcare like this steps:

• editor presets with new tags (and old legacy tags parallel)
• osm.org map style extension to render healthcare=* objects
• flag amenity=doctors, dentist, clinic, hospital, ... as legacy within QA checks
• ask community to manually remove legacy task in local areas

I'm not sure if this is the right way and how long this might take (I guess def. more than one year). Are there any other ideas how to push the acceptance of this schema? --!i! 18:24, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

What about travel medicine?

I couldn't find an entry about travel medicine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travel_medicine

In Germany, there are special doctors, who have extra programs for traveller, mostly general doctors, but at least not every general doctor.

So I think a new entry "healthcare:speciality=travel" is needed. Regards (15 June 2018‎ by Hsimpson)

Sounds plausible. I was thinking about travel or travellers, but travel seems better.--Polarbear w (talk) 15:44, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

Another healthcare:speciality value for healthcare=clinic

I propose adding the following to Key:healthcare#Specialities_for_healthcare.3Dclinic:

value	description
healthcare:speciality=sexual_health	Sexual health clinic

These are quite common in the UK and are often aimed at young people. The wiki page summarises the typical services that they offer. --Lakedistrict (talk) 08:41, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Sleep clinic

Hello, can be added sleep_clinic as a tag for healthcare?

There is a lot at least in Portugal, look for "clínica do sono"

value	description
healthcare:speciality=sleep_health	Sleep disorder specialist

mone on: Sleep disorder specialist

Cyberlima785 (talk) 21:46, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Recommend deprecating healthcare=clinic,=dentist,=doctor,=hospital, and=pharmacy

It came to my attention that healthcare=pharmacy is almost only used in addition to the more common tag amenity=pharmacy: 99.7% of healthcare=pharmacy features are also tagged with amenity=pharmacy.

The situation is similar with:

• healthcare=hospital + amenity=hospital -- 98.25%
• healthcare=dentist + amenity=dentist -- 98.3%
• healtcare=doctor + amenity=doctors -- >97%

https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/healthcare=doctor#combinations

In all cases the amenity tag is several times more common, and most features do not have the healthcare= tag added.

Instead, we should recommend using amenity=pharmacy, amenity=hospital, amenity=dentist or amenity=doctors instead, since the de facto practice is that you have to add those tags, and there isn't any reason to recommend duplicating the tags.--Jeisenbe (talk) 13:12, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

It was accepted by vote that healthcare replaces amenity? Personally I am in favor of removing healthcare from amenity as it is more precise and allows further development. Warin61 (talk) 04:04, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

"It was accepted by vote that healthcare replaces amenity?" in which vote? I remember some adding helthcare values, some of them duplicating amenity values but none deprecating amenity=hospital etc Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 11:14, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

@Jeisenbe: can you clarify what you mean, in this edit, by healthcare=pharmacy having been rejected? From what I can gather, it was merely not explicitly approved, but there was no explicit rejection either. In particular, neither the comment here:

amenity=pharmacy was not involved in the proposal. The proposal authors had first recommended changing it to shop=pharmacy but then removed this from the proposal because it was controversial, so the approved proposal did not mention either shop=pharmacy or healthcare=pharmacy: wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?oldid=589962

...nor your response to it:

The tag healthcare=pharmacy was not approved, and consensus is that this tag is not needed: amenity=pharmacy is the tag supported by other editors and all database users.

...make any mention of an explicit rejection. Furthermore, the thread that Mateusz Konieczny linked to in Tag:healthcare=pharmacy#Tag history does indicate rejection to the deprecation of amenity=pharmacy, but not of the introduction of healthcare=pharmacy. Am I missing something?

(Please note: I'm not arguing for or against use of the tag, I'm just trying to figure out whether the tag itself was explicitly rejected.) --Waldyrious (talk) 17:14, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Laboratory specialities?

The current list of healthcare:speciality options for healthcare=laboratory does not make sense: it includes radiology and other imaging-related options.

The Wikipedia definition of a medical lab is "A medical laboratory or clinical laboratory is a laboratory where clinical pathology tests are carried out on clinical specimens to obtain information about the health of a patient to aid in diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease", and the definition on this healthcare key page (from the proposal) was a bit confusing but seems similar: "Medical laboratory also called (analytical, diagnostic) is a place that analyzes body fluids such as blood, urine, faeces etc".

This seems to exclude dagnostic radiology, medical_physics and medical_engineering - perhaps these were originally meant to be used for research laboratory facilities rather than clinical, diagnostic labs?

The of the other 3 options, "blood_check" and "biology" are non-specific, though "clinical_pathology" is sensible at least, if rarely used (22 times). Looking at the database, "biology" and "blood_check" are the most common, with ~900 out of ~1100 uses, so I don't see this adding much information, from my standpoint as a physician or from the perspective of a general map user. --Jeisenbe (talk) 13:38, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

My nearest general hospital has a pathology lab. It also provides FWE (food, water, environmental) testing for microbial quality indicators and bacterial pathogens. Its formal name is Microbiology Carmarthenshire (the even more formal name is "Public Health Wales Microbiology Carmarthenshire") although most of the staff at the hospital seem to have no idea where "Microbiology Carmarthenshire" is but know where the pathology lab is. Anyway, it strikes me that the speciality should be microbiology not biology. Biology covers zoology, botany, etc. Microbiology is what is done in this lab and any others offering FWE testing as well as clinical pathology (arguably, clinical pathology is a subset of microbiology but I think it's worth keeping clinical pathology for labs that don't offer full FWE services and using clinical_pathology;microbiology where appropriate). --Brian de Ford (talk) 09:37, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Endoscopy

Can we add endoscopy as a speciality for medical facilities? My local health board operates four general hospitals each of which has an endoscopy unit serving outpatients as well as inpatients, documented here (it's a job advert but it's all I can find about any of the endoscopy units). I see only 6 uses in taginfo (plus several variations), but low number of uses could simply because it's not documented as a possible value. Is a discussion here adequate or is it such a radical idea it needs to go to the tagging mailing list? --Brian de Ford (talk) 09:49, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Urgent Care proposal

Besides emergency=* there is no further key to map the service of an amenity regarding urgency. So user Floridaeditor currently proposes to introduce urgent_care=*.

Please see the proposal:  Proposed_features/Urgent_care  by Floridaeditor  --Chris2map (talk) 14:57, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

There is also walk-in=yes - Key:walk-in - "a "walk-in clinic" is a doctor's office that serves anyone that walks in the door" --Jeisenbe (talk) 23:42, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

Adding in-use tag healthcare=hospice to list?

The tag healthcare=hospice has been used several hundred times. It was included as a preset by iD, but it seem sensible, since a hospice is a healthcare facility. From wikipedia: "Hospice care is a type of health care that focuses on the palliation of a terminally ill patient's pain and symptoms and attending to their emotional and spiritual needs at the end of life. Hospice care prioritizes comfort and quality of life by reducing pain and suffering." ... "Outside the United States, the term tends to be primarily associated with the particular buildings or institutions that specialize in such care. Such institutions may similarly provide care mostly in an end-of-life setting, but they may also be available for patients with other palliative care needs." These are healthcare facilities for patients with terminal illnesses or illnesses where curative therapies are not beneficial, staffed by specialist physicians and registered nurses. They are most similar to a hospital. (There are also outpatient hospice services where nurses and doctors visit terminally ill patients in their own homes, but these are not often mapped). --Jeisenbe (talk) 10:55, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Other Britih English definitions:

• "a hospital for people who are dying" - https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/hospice
• "a hospital for people who are dying, especially from cancer" - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hospice
• "A hospice is a special hospital for people who are dying, where their practical and emotional needs are dealt with as well as their medical needs." OR "a nursing home that specializes in caring for the terminally ill" - https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/hospice
• Wiktionary (American/British mix): "A specialized facility or organization offering palliative care for the terminally ill." OR "The provision of palliative care for terminally ill patients, either at a specialized facility or at a residence, and support for the family, typically refraining from taking extraordinary measures to prolong life." - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hospice

It appears the British definition is similar to my experience at a hospice: it's an inpatient medical facility for terminally ill patients. --Jeisenbe (talk) 11:00, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

An example of a hospice based at a hospital: http://www.tycymorth.org.uk/ It is on the hospital grounds and is (or appears to be) an NHS facility: https://www.nhsdirect.wales.nhs.uk/LocalServices/ViewLocalService.aspx?id=7762 --Brian de Ford (talk) 11:14, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Health care for dying people is still healthcare Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 23:39, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Addition of healthcare=counselling

A year ago, a new tag was added to this page, "healthcare=counselling", without a descriptions (well, it just says "healthcare counselling). Can anyone elaborate on how this tag is being used? It appears to be used with healthcare:counselling with values such as "nutrition", "dietitian" (duplicate?), "sexual", "antenatal", "psychiatry" (mistake for "psychological?"). But it was not discussed from what I can see, and was only added 1 year ago in March 2019. Can we clarify the definition of this tag? --Jeisenbe (talk) 23:11, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Speech therapy or Logopedics specialty?

There is healthcare=speech_therapist but what about combined practices? There is no specialty for it. speech_therapist tends to be used according to taginfo and is also suggested in iD, but since specialties are usually a field, logopedics or at least speech therapy seems like it would be a better option --Xerus (talk) 11:52, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Sure, healthcare:speciality=speech_therapy is fine if needed. But if you've tagged the office as healthcare=speech_therapist then this would be redundant information. --Jeisenbe (talk) 17:32, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Translations

This page includes huge tables with translations from many European languages and a few other globally common languages, but this does not seem sustainable. The tables stretch very far off the screen, requiring scrolling.

It would be better to copy these translations into language-specific pages, where the users of each language would be able to quickly find the translation. The terms could then be ordered to be alphabetical in the local language instead of alphabetical in English, if desired.

Any objections to removing the translations for this English version of the page, and archiving them in a new page or template?--Jeisenbe (talk) 18:48, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

I am thinking of moving it to Key:healthcare:speciality/Translations --Jeisenbe (talk) 19:43, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Vaccination

@Jeisenbe, you changed the description of "healthcare:speciality=vaccination" from "vaccination centre" to "vaccination clinic" and moved it from the general speciality table to a separate small "clinic" table. This does not reflect current usage, as the speciality key is momentarily mostly used for centres, and the key is not limited to clinics at all. We are trying to avoid that mappers use the clinic tagging if the facility is not for treatment of illnesses. In general I don't see a reason to separate 2-3 speciality values to 'clinic' only, so probably they should all be merged in the general table. --Polarbear w (talk) 10:21, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

I've changed it back to "centre", since I suppose the new approved tag is healthcare=vaccination_center, and changed the category to "other medical facilities", since a "fertility" treatment facility could be an amenity=clinic, but also could be a doctor's office, or another kind of facility - like a laboratory that specializes in fertility testing. The first long table is all physician specialities, so I'm trying to keep it a little more categorized. Does this work? --Jeisenbe (talk) 05:38, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

"other medical facilities" works well, thanks. --Polarbear w (talk) 19:29, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

healthcare=yes

I have documented the 8k use of healthcare=yes as "Unspecific healthcare object. Usage without further specification is discouraged.". Have a look. --Polarbear w (talk) 10:40, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Why two tags – healthcare=clinic and amenity=clinic?

This article states that “healthcare=clinic ... May be used in addition to amenity=clinic.” But what's the point of having two similar tags? Is there any difference between them? SebastianHelm (talk) 20:12, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

It is deliberate duplicate created and promoted by people who wanted/want to deprecate amenity=clinic and replace it with healthcare=clinic Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 21:33, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

I added description of tag history at healthcare=clinic (similar was already at healthcare=hospital) Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 21:38, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for the reply and the addition. So I understand this to mean “Just take any of them; it doesn't matter which, because some day all of this will be be cleaned up.” Right?

Thank you also for linking to Proposed features/Healthcare. One question, though: Your text, particularly the use of present tense in “There is [...]”, suggests that the discussion is ongoing, but the discussion has been closed and salted years ago. How does the resolution process work now? What are the chances of it ever being cleaned up? SebastianHelm (talk) 06:42, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

How to tag day hospitals ?

I'm still missing a tag for day hospitals. Actually the are sometimes tagged with healthcare=clinic (according to the definition: no inpatient treatment and sometimes), healthcare=hospital, sometimes amenity=social_facility (even if it's clearly treatment and not only care, paid by the health insurance). At least in Germany there is a clear (also legal) distinction between "Poliklinik" and "Ambulanz" (clinic) and "Tagesklinik" (day hospital). Usually you would consider in Germany a day hospital also as a hospital even if you can't stay there over night (and btw the older paper maps "rendered" it identically in the pre-internet-era if they mentioned them at all...). It's not a rare thing, the psychiatric/psychotherapeutic/psychosomatic day hospitals alone are more than 800 in Germany and there are other specialties.

I could imagine that the use of a tag healthcare=day_clinic would be appropriate and would fit to the increase of differentiation by the Key healthcare=*. --Segubi (talk)

Mapping departments of, for example, hospitals.

Someone has tried to map some departments in a hospital. Node: Manning Hospital Anaesthetic Department (7555121851) and Node: Pathology Department (5288364841). I have removed the amenity/healthcare=hospital from these as they are not hospitals by themselves. I think healthcare:department=pathology/* might be a good tag? I have not restricted it to hospitals alone as it could be used in other places. Thoughts? I raise it on the tagging list when I get to it. Warin61 (talk) 04:13, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Please update section Rendering/Editing

The Change request linked to is closed. What is the current behaviour?

Insurance

OSM should include medical insurances that are accepted (or not) by healthcare providers and facilities. There was an unsuccessful, not well though out proposal before (Tag:insurance:health). Accepted insurances are relevant for OSM. In many places they are not only a form of a payment method but also limit the access to a facility. In OSM we map things like denominations that machines or vendors accept or return. The insurances a medical provider accepts is far more relevant to average OSM user Jane than the bills she may get at an ATM. The accepted insurance, for many people, is the first criterion in the search and selection of a healthcare provider. It may be even more critical than what brands' products stores sell.

Coming up with a decent way to tag this is complicated since things are different in many countries. I'd like to invite everyone to discuss and brain storm how we can include this.

In the US, we have providers that accept some insurance companies and they may or may not be "in-network" with a company. There are also providers who generally do not accept any insurance.

In Germany, providers may or may not accept public insurances and the same is true for commercial insurances. Some providers may not accept any insurance.

How are things in other countries? --Freetz (talk) 21:51, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

There was actually an import AT/Steiermark/OGD/Ärzte years before insurance:health=* using insurance=* (funny insurance=health is documented alone) or insurance:*=* for each insurance or payer system https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=insurance
—— Kovposch (talk) 11:57, 26 December 2023 (UTC)