Our EMR allows for an account guarantor to be responsible for charges coming from multiple patients. What FHIR resource should be used to represent the guarantor, and how should the guarantor’s relationship to multiple patients in the account be represented?
If the guarantor is an Organization, that’s straight-forward. However, if they’re an individual, that’s a challenge, as RelatedPerson is patient-specific. You can use Person to indicate that all of the RelatedPerson instances are talking about the same individual, but there’s no ability to link directly to Person (and won’t be). Feel free to submit a change request highlighting this as an issue and the community can explore other possible solutions.
Thanks for the quick response. Very helpful!
In addition, in the FHIR wiki, there is an Account example which shows the use of RelatedPerson to represent a guarantor for a given patient. FHIR Account example with Guarantor
Using Account might enable you to have that many-to-one relationship between patients and a single guarantor?
The RelatedPerson would still be tied to a single Patient. Account would also generally be tied to a single Patient.
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