Stream: argonaut
Topic: HumanName.text question for clients
Grahame Grieve (Oct 10 2019 at 06:57):
All, I have a question for clients (not servers!). When you receive a resource that contains a HumanName element, and you want to display the name, would you use HumanName.text (if present) or Would you use HumanName.family and HumanName.given?
For servers, do you populate HumanName.text? I see that US Core doesn't make that mandatory?
Grahame Grieve (Oct 10 2019 at 06:59):
the background to this question is that for internationalization purposes, it seems as though we want to make HumanName.text mandatory and must support. It sweeps a whole lot of curly name issues around order and weird part name customs under the carpet. How do people feel about that?
Brian Postlethwaite (Oct 10 2019 at 08:10):
My server will populate the text if it isn't supplied. And when filling out reference.display, I use that value.
And for my client usage, I use the text if it is there (and ref.display when that is there)
Jenni Syed (Oct 10 2019 at 13:48):
Cerner's server populates text using the formatting rules of the underlying system
Brian Zimbelman (Oct 10 2019 at 13:55):
I don't believe we use text in any of our apps as of yet. The ones I'm most familiar with use an internal routine to build the name from the parts (family & given). All our customers to date have been from North America, so we have not had an issue with needing to support other formatting but will probably in the near future. If text was always available and met our needs, we would consider it.
Pascal Pfiffner (Oct 12 2019 at 03:46):
We figure out which HumanName to pick based on use and period and then construct the name to show from family and given. It'd be easier to just use text if that was required. :P
Keith Boone (Oct 21 2019 at 14:14):
All, I have a question for clients (not servers!). When you receive a resource that contains a HumanName element, and you want to display the name, would you use HumanName.text (if present) or Would you use HumanName.family and HumanName.given?
For servers, do you populate HumanName.text? I see that US Core doesn't make that mandatory?
I don't necessarily trust servers to do reasonable things in HumanName.text. I still see EHRs sending last, first in text fields or when using simple <name> elements in CDA (w/o <given> and <family>), or displaying in a variety of different ways. For an end user experience, client apps generally want to ensure that there's consistency in what the end user sees. When attaching a client to multiple EHR endpoint's, it's still very much "wild west" if you let the server create the text that shows up in the UI.
Examples of variations in server text include: "LAST, FIRST", "FIRST LAST", "First Last", "First M. Last", "First Middle Last").
Mikael Rinnetmäki (Nov 26 2019 at 10:56):
I don't necessarily trust my own client to do the reasonable thing for each culture and environment. So our apps prefer text and constructs a name string from pieces only in the case that field does not exist. But it's mainly for displaying the name on the UI, we don't use the name for any matching purposes.
Grahame Grieve (Nov 27 2019 at 22:38):
thx
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
