Many professional locations list publicly the practitioners that practice within a location. Most notably medical, legal, and accountant firms are sometimes referred to more by the practitioner located within a location than the formal name of the building or office itself. This information can be a valuable addition to the data within OSM by adding the ability to query and filter by practitioner name as well as the building or office name. Additionally, further use can be used by querying Key:healthcare:speciality or Key:craft to display a list of all practitioners in a given predefined area or operator. This tag is intended to be used to signify a list of one or more individuals, all of whom are operating in one location, all of whom are practicing the same speciality.
Special care should be taken when listing practitioners to only list those names which are publicly made available, such as those listed on a sign or advertisement.
Link to proposal. Please discuss this proposal on its Wiki Talk page.
Sometimes operator= is already used for this. There are at least ~400 MD + ~100 M.D , ~13k Dr
The company in operator= might be be considered for move to owner= as an alternative. For completeness, NHS may not be suitable for operator= in UK for both reasons. It mostly concerns hospitals, and then it should be each NHS trust. Should NHS be used to label hospitals in the UK?
If operator= is used for the company, there will be an overlap and redundancy between operator= and practitioner*= for “sole proprietorships” or “partnerships”. This causes a question of whether to fill in both.
Tracking and updating could be difficult for OSM. Indicating the number of doctors eg *:count= (capacity= refers to patients more, and does it include waiting, or per day?), and linking to *:url= can be done first. The list of doctors may be fetched from that webpage. Furthermore, contacts can be obtained there, instead of adding *:phone= , *:email= , etc, for everyone.
It may be awkward if this is used for office= , craft= , and other features. Legal practitioner is less worse. Depends on British English usage.
Format-wise, there are already 12 singular practitioner | Keys | OpenStreetMap Taginfo
“Practitioner” is a nicely descriptive term, but I wonder if it’s really necessary to establish a new key for this information. I’ve been using owner=* a lot for the names of the practitioners whose nameplates are posted at professional offices, as well as name=* when the owner’s name serves as the name of the establishment, and operator=* when the owner has formed an organization of any sort to operate the business. Do you see any possible conflict that would necessitate a separate key?
For what it’s worth, I use semicolon-delimited lists whenever the practitioners share a facility indistinctly; otherwise, when I can discern some spatial pattern within the facility, I map the professional services as points within the building. I tend not to dual-tag the building when the service potentially carries a different identity than the building.
The operator tag is used to name a company, corporation, person or any other entity who is directly in charge of the current operation of a map object.
The owner tag is used to indicate the identity of corporations, companies, non-profits, governments, organizations (and other entities) or people who actually own a map feature.
I see Proposal:practitioners as a bit more lower level, the actual individual who sees the customer, patient, or client. It is quite possible to have a situation where Jane Doe, MD is both the practitioner and the operator, in which case it would make sense to tag both as this is not a duplication but a reflection of Dr. Doe’s dual role.
Love the idea of a simple practitioners:count tag and can see opportunity for Street Complete quests etc. on that tag.
As far as practitioner=* those 12 are all me testing the feasibility and legibility in my local area. I would assume the consensus would be to pluralize to practitioners=* in the formal proposal here and I will update my edits once voting is complete.
Perhaps it is a bit granular but I see practitioners=* as a lower level detail. For instance, a craft=builder office may be owned by a conglomerate, operated by a local chapter, but ultimately practiced by an individual, group, or union. In the medical sense, unless otherwise sourced, typically the practitioner(s) present at a location are listed not necessarily the owners or operators who manage the building, staff, etc… @Kovoschiz also brought up duplication in several fields with the name, but having operator=Jane Doe, MD and practitioners=Jane Doe, MD is not a duplication but rather a reflection of Dr. Doe’s dual role and would be accurate to describe her as both in my opinion.
The proposal now splits practitioners=* into practitioners:primary=* and practitioners:support=* in order to avoid the 255-character limit for tag values. It gives an example of practitioners:support=* as “John Doe, CNA”, using the professional title for a certified nursing assistant.
Despite the warning in the rationale, someone could reasonably interpret this tagging scheme as a rote employee list – not only principals like the doctors, dentists, and attorneys whose nameplates adorn the front door, but also the nurses, hygienists, and paralegals whose names the customer may come across during a visit. The support staff would turn over much more easily than the key people at the practice. They don’t have a direct relationship with the customer and probably have an increased expectation of privacy. To the extent that the public would need their names and qualifications, they can already find this information elsewhere, such as in an accreditation board’s registry.
I’d suggest choosing an example that better illustrates the need for tagging “secondary” practitioners, such as a law firm’s partners and associates. I’d also suggest finding a more concrete example with a demonstration of the sources a mapper could realistically use to obtain this information.
I am really concerned about the privacy implications and maintaining the accuracy of the data.
Not a lawyer but I think creating a database of people and their physical location may be against the law in most of Europe. Could we be providing targetting information for aggrieved people?
Having Joe Bloggs LLC - lawyers is one thing - listing all their workers is totally different. We need to be very careful.
In the UK many practitioners put their name on the entrance to a property and so the information is available - but they change regularly. A large law practice may heve their lawyers listed on the entrance - but which OSM’r is going to go there every month and check it is correct? I know that people move and change jobs regularly - we cannot update OSM with this level of granularity and retain accuracy.
If this reaches the vote stage I will vote against it.
Yes, agree with TonyS999 and with what Kevin said on the wiki talk page - we aren’t making an org chart nor an employee list. Stick to the names of the top-level professionals who are publicly advertised - the five partners in the law firm, the couple running the doctor’s practice - but don’t record their employees, apprentices, and so on. This would indeed violate privacy law in the EU, and even where it does not violate the law, let’s give these people some privacy. As Kevin said above, “They don’t have a direct relationship with the customer and probably have an increased expectation of privacy” - and I don’t see why we should play data kraken here.
Fantastic points made by @TonyS999 and @woodpeck. I would like to clarify in the proposal it is not for use of a org chart or staff directory. It is instead used for publicly advertised, street level visible, or other publicly verifiable source. The risk of listing someone who does not want to be public is non-existent if contributors tag this correctly. If a user uses OSM in any law violating way it would be a violation, and improperly using this tag to do so does not make the underlying proposal less useful. Some people and especially elderly may know practitioners by their name, not necessarily by their office name. “I go to see Dr. Doe” is a lot more common than “I go to Medical Associates of Anytown.”
As far as updates, I’m not sure there’s any larger risk of a top-level practitioner moving than there is a myriad of other tags changing. Since this is the top-level members in a firm and not apprentices or general staff, turnover should be relatively infrequent to match the pace of change of other tags. A partner in a law firm does not typically only stay for a year for instance.
I think you haven’t really addressed how this relates to the proposed “:support” variant. That doesn’t sound like it refers to top-level members. If the real reason for that variant is to split very long lists, perhaps it would better to be up-front about that and use something like practitioners:1 etc, or some other format that has worked for other keys.
That may well be true. OSM already struggles to keep information about businesses/amenities up to date (as do other organisations that gather this kind of data). I suppose you could argue that adding yet more possibly stale data isn’t a big deal. But I think one reason people are raising this is that in most other cases, the outdated data doesn’t relate to named individuals.
I believe my next change to the proposal will be to remove the support and primary specification on the tag and keep the primary tag and the count. My concern around line limit (which I only hit once in my 12 surveyed locations) may be outweighed by the privacy concerns surrounding support tagging. Both this proposal and the wiki if accepted will make exceedingly clear the names for this field need to be publicly displayed.
Proposal has been updated to limit the scope to a single practitioners key (with clear warning) and count value. practitioners:primary and practitioners:support should no longer be considered as a part of this proposal.
Thanks, one nit though: can you change the example of “practitioners=Jane Doe, MD; John Doe, CNA” to “practitioners=Jane Doe, MD; John Doe, CNAMD”? I suppose a nurse-led clinic in the U.S. could be known by an advance practice nurse’s name, but the nurse wouldn’t go by CNA. The postnominal for an advanced practice nurse would be quite different and more obscure, making it a poor example.
The proposal would benefit from a photo or link to street-level imagery, as an example of how one would ascertain the practitioner’s name without referring to an external database.
Thomas H. Moseley, Jr., M.D.;Bolan P. Woodward, M.D.;Roy E. Swindle, M.D.; Alex M. Culbreth, III, M.D.;Kimberly N. Cross, M.D.;Linnea A. Mehls, M.D.;Marie T. Dazey, C.N.M;Stacy C. Reid, C.N.M.;Teresa W. Johnson, C.N.M;Liz Burling, C.N.M.;Kari C. Tjossem, P.A.C.;Blair E. Tomlinson, N.P.C.;Gina S. Dungan, N.P.C.;Sarah W. Stone, C.N.P.
is 334 characters; as also mentioned on the talk page, the maximum is 255.
In other cases this is often solved with number suffixes. So
practitioners:1=Thomas H. Moseley, Jr., MD
practitioners:2=Bolan P. Woodward, MD
practitioners:3=Roy E. Swindle, MD
etc.
Alternatively, to avoid a large amount of tags, mix the two:
practitioners:1=Thomas H. Moseley, Jr., MD;Bolan P. Woodward, MD;Roy E. Swindle, MD;Alex M. Culbreth, III, MD;Kimberly N. Cross, MD;Linnea A Mehls, MD;Marie T. Dazey, CNM;Stacy C. Reid, CNM;Teresa W. Johnson, CNM;Liz Burling, CNM;Kari C. Tjossem, PAC
practitioners:2=Blair E. Tomlinson, NPC;Gina S. Dungan, NPC;Sarah W. Stone, CNP
My main concerns are about large facilities, like general hospitals:
Large lists: A local hospital here lists 314 doctors on their site, and that’s doctors alone. It might be obvious that we shouldn’t map those, but perhaps discourage that explicitly. I saw mention of practitioners:url, that looks kind of sensible.
Ballpark counts:practitioners:count would be useful to have an idea of scale, but it would also be impossible to keep up-to-date. De facto these would be a ballpark number. Would it be an idea to document that? Or even allow to map ballpark numbers directly, like practitioners:count=250-350.
Apologies for the misspelling I’m on mobile right now! Yes, the combining of :1 :2 … makes the most sense. When you hit the character limit move to the second tag.
Count can be approximate if not known precisely but the multiple doctors practicing in several locations such as a main office and also a surgeon at the hospital is documented in the proposal under potential issues that I’d love community feedback on.
