PersonName types?

Continuing the discussion from bahmni registration search multiple local name parts:

Bahmni’s default config allows you to record a Name in Local Language (often in a non-latin script) in addition to the Patient Name.

Under the hood we have implemented local language name as individual person attributes for each name component (e.g. in this image there are 3)

In the long run it might be better to use a PersonName to store this (e.g. it would make it easier to solve the problem in the post I’m forking from), but I don’t think we could do this without having something like “Person Name Type” in openmrs-core.

Thoughts?

Could it make sense to just add a “locale” or “language” field to Person Name, or is there something more we are looking to distinguish between here?

I was thinking of something like FHIR’s HumanName.use field.

They support the value set:

  • usual
  • official
  • temp
  • nickname
  • anonymous
  • old
  • maiden

I don’t know that we’d need all of these options in the common OpenMRS case, but if we took this path we’d definitely want to add Name In Local Language as an option.

PS: in other words, for Bahmni it would make a lot more sense to have a “local language” name type, then to have to configure locale = “in”, “bd”, etc, depending on the implementation.