An identifier for this patient.

Patients are almost always assigned specific numerical identifiers.

Whether this patient record is in active use.

Need to be able to mark a patient record as not to be used because it was created in error.

Default is true. If a record is inactive, and linked to an active record, then future patient/record updates should occur on the other patient

This element is labeled as a modifier because when the patient record is marked as not active it is not expected to be used/referenced without being changed back to active.

A name associated with the individual.

Need to be able to track the patient by multiple names. Examples are your official name and a partner name.

A patient may have multiple names with different uses or applicable periods. For animals, the name is a "HumanName" in the sense that is assigned and used by humans and has the same patterns.

A contact detail (e.g. a telephone number or an email address) by which the individual may be contacted.

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

A Patient 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. The address may not go directly to the individual, but may reach another party that is able to proxy for the patient (i.e. home phone, or pet owner's phone).

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

Needed for identification of the individual, in combination with (at least) name and birth date. Gender of individual drives many clinical processes.

The gender may not match the biological sex as determined by genetics, or the individual's preferred identification. Note that for both humans and particularly animals, there are other legitimate possibilities than M and F, though the vast majority of systems and contexts only support M and F. Systems providing decision support or enforcing business rules should ideally do this on the basis of Observations dealing with the specific gender aspect of interest (anatomical, chromosonal, social, etc.) However, because these observations are infrequently recorded, defaulting to the administrative gender is common practice. Where such defaulting occurs, rule enforcement should allow for the variation between administrative and biological, chromosonal and other gender aspects. For example, an alert about a hysterectomy on a male should be handled as a warning or overrideable error, not a "hard" error.

The date of birth for the individual.

Age of the individual drives many clinical processes.

At least an estimated year should be provided as a guess if the real DOB is unknown There is a standard extension "patient-birthTime" available that should be used where Time is required (such as in maternaty/infant care systems).

Addresses for the individual.

May need to keep track of patient addresses for contacting, billing or reporting requirements and also to help with identification.

Patient may have multiple addresses with different uses or applicable periods.

This field contains a patient's most recent marital (civil) status.

Most, if not all systems capture it.

Image of the patient.

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

A contact party (e.g. guardian, partner, friend) for the patient.

Need to track people you can contact about the patient.

Contact covers all kinds of contact parties: family members, business contacts, guardians, caregivers. Not applicable to register pedigree and family ties beyond use of having contact.

This patient is known to be an animal.

Many clinical systems are extended to care for animal patients as well as human.

The animal element is labeled "Is Modifier" since patients may be non-human. Systems SHALL either handle patient details appropriately (e.g. inform users patient is not human) or reject declared animal records. The absense of the animal element does not imply that the patient is a human. If a system requires such a positive assertion that the patient is human, an extension will be required. (Do not use a species of homo-sapiens in animal species, as this would incorrectly infer that the patient is an animal).

Languages which may be used to communicate with the patient about his or her health.

If a patient does not speak the local language, interpreters may be required, so languages spoken and proficiency is an important things to keep track of both for patient and other persons of interest.

If no language is specified, this implies that the default local language is spoken. If you need to convey proficiency for multiple modes then you need multiple Patient.Communication associations. For animals, language is not a relevant field, and should be absent from the instance. If the Patient does not speak the default local language, then the Interpreter Required Standard can be used to explicitly declare that an interpreter is required.

Patient's nominated care provider.

This may be the primary care provider (in a GP context), or it may be a patient nominated care manager in a community/disablity setting, or even organization that will provide people to perform the care provider roles.

It is not to be used to record Care Teams, these should be in a CareTeam resource that may be linked to the CarePlan or EpisodeOfCare resources.

Organization that is the custodian of the patient record.

Need to know who recognizes this patient record, manages and updates it.

There is only one managing organization for a specific patient record. Other organizations will have their own Patient record, and may use the Link property to join the records together (or a Person resource which can include confidence ratings for the association).

Link to another patient resource that concerns the same actual patient.

There are multiple usecases:

• Duplicate patient records due to the clerical errors associated with the difficulties of identifying humans consistently, and * Distribution of patient information across multiple servers.

There is no assumption that linked patient records have mutual links.

This element is labelled as a modifier because it may not be the main Patient resource, and the referenced patient should be used instead of this Patient record. This is when the link.type value is 'replaced-by'.