Stream: implementers
Topic: Representation of a patients legal guardian
Marco Descher (Jan 28 2019 at 08:16):
What is the correct way to represent a patients or persons legal guardian? I found Patient#contact where I would go for Relationship Next-For-Kin but that does not seem to fully fit it and I found http://wiki.hl7.org/index.php?title=FHIR_Person#Person.Guardian which seems to be an ongoing discussion!? thanks
Lloyd McKenzie (Jan 28 2019 at 15:07):
Person is only used to maintain shared demographics for a single human being across multiple Patient, Practitioner and/or RelatedPerson records. The data it has is redundant with the data available elsewhere. Your choices are Patient.contact or RelatedPerson. The former is when you just want the contact information. The latter is when they're going to be an actor in the system - someone who witnesses, receives information, provides information, etc.
Marco Descher (Jan 29 2019 at 07:50):
Thank you very much for this detailed explanation!
Marco Descher (Feb 13 2019 at 13:41):
Considering the use of a RelatedPerson, I guess the link to a patients guardian would have to be of type "seealso" is that right? It may well be, that a patients guardian is also an active patient with the EMR resource, but only seen as a RelatedPerson in the scope of the current patient. My use case is on editing a patient, I might have to search the list of existing "Persons" with the FHIR resource, in order to add this new relationship to the current Patient. If I will not do it this way, there might exist two contacts in the end representing the same person (i.e. as patient, and as another patients guardian)
Lloyd McKenzie (Feb 13 2019 at 16:15):
Linkage between a RelatedPerson and the equivalent patient - for the subset of systems that actually do that - would be either with an extension or using the Person resource.
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
