Representing relationships
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Last updated
Was this helpful?
One of the unique features of Agni is its ability to relate individuals to one another.
Three types of relationships provide useful information from a public health perspective:
Genetic relationships, such as that between a biological mother and daughter, can be used to assess risk with a hereditary component, such as the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and diabetes.
Cohabitation information, such as two friends sharing an apartment, or children going to the same classroom, can be used to assess risk of infectious diseases, such as COVID-19 and Tuberculosis.
Legally-related individuals, such as a couple and their adopted child, may have administrative utility. They may form an administrative entity for various government programs, across health, nutrition, and social protection.
It is quite common that all three types intersect: legally- and biologically-related individuals often cohabit.
Agni's workflow presently focuses on biologically- and legally-related individuals. It has been designed so that it can be expanded to include cohabitation.
Agni stores patient records and relationship data separately, so that each individual remains an independent entity — removing one record or relationship does not impact another. This is illustrated below, with an example of a family consisting of a mother and her son, both of whom are part of a national registry.
Registry data is stored in Agni as a Person resource. This helps with population enumeration, or "knowing the denominator". Someone does not have to be a patient to be recognized by the health system.
When an individual receives healthcare services for the first time, Agni creates a Patient resource based on the Person resource. Concurrently, Agni creates a RelatedPerson resource, which stores the relationship between both objects. Each relationship is stored as a separate entity — one pointing from Mother to Son, and the other from Son to Mother.
This design serves as a backbone that can be used to engineer more complex features — such as updating an individual's cardic risk profile based on their biological parents’ medical history.
Agni uses the term "household" to describe the entity that is created by a group of interrelated individuals. However, a household does not have its own ; it is exists as long as the connections between patients exist. Even address is a property of an individual — many individuals can have the same address — it is not the property of a household.