Stream: implementers
Topic: Multiple 'Person'alities
John O'Gorman (Feb 01 2018 at 22:25):
In FHIR, can a Person be a Patient, RelatedPerson and Practitioner at the same time?
And can someone explain the consequence of these statements:
"Not many systems actually implement a shared Person record, and as such the values DO become out of sync with each other. The inclusion of this resource does permit a capability for systems to identify other instances of this actual person's data via a centralized registry that can assist in keeping things up to date."
Follow-on question: Would a Person registry be a smart thing to add to a FHIR-compliant architecture? Thanks
Grahame Grieve (Feb 01 2018 at 22:26):
yes, a real life person may manifest as all of those things. Staff in country hospitals almost certainly will.
Grahame Grieve (Feb 01 2018 at 22:27):
for the follow on question, I think about it as a business question: is it a smart thing for a business to track individuals across their multiple roles.... if so, then it's a smart thing to have a person registry. But few organizations do have such a thing.... so maybe it's not often a net benefit once you account for the costs
John O'Gorman (Feb 01 2018 at 22:31):
"A real life Person may manifest"... agreed, but how is it managed in FHIR?
As to the cost / benefit - could an argument be made for interoperability starting with a register and connecting aliases?
Grahame Grieve (Feb 01 2018 at 22:33):
it is managed using the Person resource
John O'Gorman (Feb 01 2018 at 22:39):
Thanks Graheme. So is the following statement relevant to that approach?
"The inclusion of this resource does permit a capability for systems to identify other instances of this actual person's data via a centralized registry
that can assist in keeping things up to date."
In other words, would the Person resource treat 'John Doe' from an EHR and 'Doe, John Q.' as the same entity?
Grahame Grieve (Feb 01 2018 at 22:49):
that's the point of Person - to link the 2 of them an indicate that they are the same real world person
Lloyd McKenzie (Feb 02 2018 at 00:28):
Person has a few use-cases. It can serve as a way to maintain a shared set of demographics - systems could maintain minimal (or differential) demographics on Patient/RelatedPerson/Practitioner and maintain most on Person. (Though this would be best from an internal/persistance perspective rather than an external/exchange perspective.) It can also be used where full demographics are maintained on all resources, but Person helps to maintain consistency by acting as a central source of truth which can trigger updates to others. It can also be used to note that Dr. Smith = Patient Smith, which can be helpful in monitoring for inappropriate access violations.
Lloyd McKenzie (Feb 02 2018 at 00:29):
Typically those use-cases only manifest in relatively advanced implementations
Lloyd McKenzie (Feb 02 2018 at 00:30):
As well, all of those uses can raise some dicey security/privacy issues, so care needs to be taken when implementing them.
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
