1 to 1 or 1 to Many: RelatedPerson and Patient Relationship

Just curious about this relationship…

RelatedPerson resource has 1-1 cardinality to a Patient.

How would you store a Mother that is related to multiple kids?
Would you ended up creating two RelatedPerson that is linked to single Person via link.
So linke this

Person.link1 : RelatedPerson1(Mother)->Patient1

Person.link2 : RelatedPerson2(Mother)->Patient2

Person.link3 : RelatedPerson3(Mother)->Patient3

Person.link4 : RelatedPerson4(Mother)->Patient4

Is this looks right to group? LLyod?

Patient.link is 0…*
You can have as many RelatedPerson resources linked to a Patient as you need.

As per FHIR guidance, Patient.link shall be used only for this patient related resources. Here is a verbatim guidance…“Link to another patient resource that concerns the same actual person”.

So I do not think this is the way it will work. We can not use Patient.link. More over it does not have relationship type code as well.

RelatedPerson is “owned” by the associated Patient. If you want to have a single record that captures multiple relationships to different Patients, you need the Person resource. The Person resource allows you to maintain shared demographics for multiple RelatedPerson, Patient and/or Practitioner instances. In this case, you’d have a Person who represents the mother and then a Patient and a RelatedPerson instance for each child. The Person would link to each of the RelatedPerson instances.

Thank you Llyod. So this is the fundamental that RelatedPerson is owned by a patient hence 1-1 relationship.

So if I want to have a Hierarchical relationship between Persons. Like a family tree, how would I achieve?
Existing FHIR models assumes that world is centered on Person and Patient but relationship among various person is missing?

Like
Person1 <— —>Person

Person is a linking resource. Its purpose is to tie together Patients, RelatedPersons and Practitioners. If you really want to track relationships for Persons, I guess you could use an extension.

Thanks Lloyd. Yes, I was come to the same conclusion.