Using Skills

Overview#

Skills are a generic abstraction for any provider attribute your organization cares about — licensed regions, enrollments, spoken languages, clinical specialties, and more. Rather than building separate systems for each attribute type, you define skills, assign values to providers, and enforce skill requirements.

This gives you a single, composable mechanism that covers a wide range of scheduling constraints without custom logic for each one.

Core concepts#

Skills#

A skill is a named category of provider attribute. Each skill has an id and a set of possible values.

Skill assignments#

A provider can hold zero or more values for each skill, as well as a valid range for the assignment:

Skill requirements#

A skill requirement is a constraint — typically placed on a shift — that a provider must satisfy in order to be eligible. Requirements are composable: you can combine simple checks with and / or logic to express complex eligibility rules.

Requirement schema#

Skill requirements use a recursive, tree-structured schema. There are two node types: leaf nodes that check a single skill value, and logical nodes that combine other requirements.

equal — leaf requirement#

Asserts that a provider holds a specific value for a specific skill.

{
  "type": "equal",
  "skill": "licensed-region-id",
  "value": "US-KY"
}

and — all must match#

{
  "type": "and",
  "entries": [
    { "type": "equal", "skill": "licensed-region-id", "value": "US-KY" },
    { "type": "equal", "skill": "enrollment-id", "value": "st_mary" }
  ]
}

or — at least one must match#

{
  "type": "or",
  "entries": [
    { "type": "equal", "skill": "licensed-region-id", "value": "US-KY" },
    { "type": "equal", "skill": "licensed-region-id", "value": "US-OH" }
  ]
}

Full type definition#

The schema is recursive — and and or nodes can contain any mix of equal, and, and or children, allowing arbitrary nesting depth.

type SkillRequirement =
  | {
      type: "equal";
      skill: string;
      value: string;
    }
  | {
      type: "and" | "or";
      entries: SkillRequirement[];
    };