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Contact

The Contact is an encryptable root-level entity that records the medical information about the patient. A visit to the patient's house, a consultation at the practice, a phone call between the patient and the healthcare party or integrating lab reports into the medical file are examples of when a contact can be recorded.

A Contact can occur with or without direct interaction between the patient and the healthcare party. For example, when a healthcare party encodes data received from laboratory's test result, this is done in the absence of a patient.

A Contact groups together pieces of information collected during one single event, for one single patient and for one or more healthcare parties. Patient's complaints, the diagnosis of a new problem, a surgical procedure, etc. are collected inside a Contact.

Modifying a Closed Contact​

Each Contact has an openingDate and closingDate that represent the moments when the moment of creation of medical data starts and ends.

Once a contact is closed (i.e. its closingDate is not null), it is a good practice not to modify it anymore. Instead, a new Contact should be created.

Fields Encrypted by Default​

By default, the following fields of this entity will be encrypted:

You can customize the encrypted fields as explained in this how to.

Properties​

Below you will find an explanation of the most commonly used properties in the entity that are not among the shared fields. For a full list, check the reference documentation (🚧).

closingDate​

The closingDate represent the moment when the Contact ended. It is encoded as a FuzzyDateTime.

descr​

A human-readable description for the Contact.

encounterLocation​

An address to record where the Contact took place.

encounterType​

A CodeStub to give a context to the type of Contact using a standard terminology.

groupId​

The medical information contained into a single "logical" Contact can be separated into multiple Contact entities that share the same groupId. This use case is explained in more details in this how to.

notes​

A list of textual remarks related to this Contact.

openingDate​

The openingDate represent the starting moment of the event of the Contact. It is encoded as a FuzzyDateTime.

participants​

The ids of all the other Data Owners that participated in this encounter, associated to their role in the encounter.

caution

This field is not encrypted by default, so be sure of not including any Patient id in this field as it will break the anonymization between Contact and Patient.

services​

A collection of Services that contain the value of the examinations performed during the encounter.

subContacts​

A collection of SubContact to link to the containing Contact additional medical context, like HealthElements or therapeutic plans.