How to model salutation / form of address for a HumanName

1

Hi everyone,

I am currently wondering about the salutation (also called form of address) for patients. To clarify, if you write a letter and start with “Dear Mr. Miller”, I refer to the “Mr.”

I think this would be part of HumanName, but I could be wrong. Now, most times I could simply defer this from the gender because there’s only “Mr.” and “Mrs.” as salutation. But in case I have a gender of “other”, it would be polite to ask the person: “How would you like to be addressed”. And then, I would need a place to store this information.

Is there a way to model this with the standard that I have overlooked? If not - shouldn’t this be supported, since an official third gender is legally supported by more and more countries?

Best,
Fitsch

2

You are looking for HumanName.prefix

3

Thanks a lot. I found out that this seems to be an issue of the German base profile. Because there, you have to additionally set a qualifier for the prefix (http://hl7.org/fhir/STU3/valueset-name-part-qualifier.html), and this does not contain salutations.

Also I just read on the details page that, for the german profile, prefix should not be used for salutations and that they should only appear in HumanName.text (https://simplifier.net/BasisprofilDE/humanname-de-basis-0.2/~details).
Doesn’t make too much sense to me, but it looks like I’ll have to talk to HL7 Germany then :wink:

Thanks again!

4

Try taking it up here: https://chat.fhir.org/#narrow/stream/179183-german-(d-a-ch)