Identifier for a person within a particular scope.

People are known by a variety of ids. Some institutions maintain several, and most collect identifiers for exchange with other organizations concerning the patient. Examples are national person identifier and local identifier.

RelatedPerson identifiers might not be unique across instances within a system, as a single human individual may be represented as many different RelatedPerson resources with different roles, periods, or relationships.

Whether this related person record is in active use.

Need to be able to mark a related person record as not to be used, such as if it was created in error.

This element is labeled as a modifier because it may be used to mark that the resource was created in error.

This resource is generally assumed to be active if no value is provided for the active element

The patient this person is related to.

We need to know which patient this RelatedPerson is related to.

References SHALL be a reference to an actual FHIR resource, and SHALL be resolvable (allowing for access control, temporary unavailability, etc.). Resolution can be either by retrieval from the URL, or, where applicable by resource type, by treating an absolute reference as a canonical URL and looking it up in a local registry/repository.

The nature of the relationship between the related person and the patient.

We need to know the relationship with the patient since it influences the interpretation of the information attributed to this person.

The directionality of the relationship is from the RelatedPerson to the Patient. For example, if the Patient is a child, and the RelatedPerson is the mother, the relationship would be PRN (parent) or MTH (mother).

The nature of the relationship between a patient and the related person.

A name associated with the person.

Related persons need to be identified by name, but it is uncommon to need details about multiple other names for that person.

Names may be changed, or repudiated, or people may have different names in different contexts. Names may be divided into parts of different type that have variable significance depending on context, though the division into parts does not always matter. With personal names, the different parts might or might not be imbued with some implicit meaning; various cultures associate different importance with the name parts and the degree to which systems must care about name parts around the world varies widely.

A contact detail for the person, e.g. a telephone number or an email address.

People have (primary) ways to contact them in some way such as phone, email.

Person may have multiple ways to be contacted with different uses or applicable periods. May need to have options for contacting the person urgently, and also to help with identification.

Administrative Gender - the gender that the person is considered to have for administration and record keeping purposes.

Needed for identification of the person, in combination with (at least) name and birth date.

Note that FHIR strings SHALL NOT exceed 1,048,576 (1024*1024) characters in size

The gender of a person used for administrative purposes.

The date on which the related person was born.

Address where the related person can be contacted or visited.

Need to keep track where the related person can be contacted per postal mail or visited.

Note: address is intended to describe postal addresses for administrative purposes, not to describe absolute geographical coordinates. Postal addresses are often used as proxies for physical locations (also see the Location resource).

Image of the person.

Many EHR systems have the capability to capture an image of persons. Fits with newer social media usage too.

When providing a summary view (for example with Observation.value[x]) Attachment should be represented with a brief display text such as "Signed Procedure Consent".

The period of time during which this relationship is or was active. If there are no dates defined, then the interval is unknown.

If an individual has a relationship with a patient over multiple, non-adjacent periods, there should be a distinct RelatedPerson instance for each period. For example, if a person is a roommate for a period of time, moves out, and is later a roommate with the same person again, you would have two RelatedPerson instances.

The ISO-639-1 alpha 2 code in lower case for the language, optionally followed by a hyphen and the ISO-3166-1 alpha 2 code for the region in upper case; e.g. "en" for English, or "en-US" for American English versus "en-AU" for Australian English.

Most systems in multilingual countries will want to convey language. Not all systems actually need the regional dialect.

The structure aa-BB with this exact casing is one the most widely used notations for locale. However not all systems actually code this but instead have it as free text. Hence CodeableConcept instead of code as the data type.

IETF language tag for a human language

Indicates whether or not the related person prefers this language (over other languages he or she masters up a certain level).

People that master multiple languages up to certain level may prefer one or more, i.e. feel more confident in communicating in a particular language making other languages sort of a fall back method.

This language is specifically identified for communicating healthcare information.