Information about a person that is involved in a patient's health or the care for a patient, but who is not the primary target of healthcare.

Need to track persons related to the patient or the healthcare process.

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.

The patient this person is related to.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

Image of the person.

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

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.

A language which may be used to communicate with the related person about the patient's health.

If a related person 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 RelatedPerson.Communication associations. If the RelatedPerson does not speak the default local language, then the Interpreter Required Standard can be used to explicitly declare that an interpreter is required.

The language which may be used to communicate with the individual.

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

The language is commonly represented using the ISO-639-1 alpha code in lower case for the language, optionally followed by a hyphen and the ISO-3166-1 alpha code for the region in upper case. For example, "en" for English, or "en-US" for American English versus "en-AU" for Australian English, sgn-US for American Sign Language, sgn-NL for Dutch Sign Language, etc.

Not all systems actually code this but instead have it as free text. Hence CodeableConcept instead of code as the data type.

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.