The FHIR R4 FamilyMemberHistory resource captures information about a patient's family health history, including diagnoses, conditions, and other relevant details about family members' health statuses. This resource is useful for understanding hereditary conditions, risk factors, and providing personalized care.
Health Gorilla exposes FamilyMemberHistory as part of its FHIR R4 API to support patient-centric access to family health and hereditary risk information.
Use Cases
- Retrieving family history of genetic or hereditary conditions
- Logging new family member health details for risk assessment
- Monitoring changes to family medical histories
Scope and Behavior
This documentation describes the FHIR R4 API interface for FamilyMemberHistory. Health Gorilla’s platform may use additional internal services and data standards to acquire, normalize, and route clinical information. Only the FHIR R4–exposed behavior is documented here.
Health Gorilla supports a subset of the HL7 FHIR R4 FamilyMemberHistory resource. Not all optional elements defined in the HL7 specification may be stored, indexed, or returned. Unsupported or unrecognized elements may be ignored or normalized during processing.
In Health Gorilla, FamilyMemberHistory is most commonly accessed as part of patient record retrieval workflows, where family health data may be aggregated from connected systems and normalized for longitudinal review. This resource supports risk assessment, preventive care planning, and clinical decision support use cases.
Authentication
All requests to the FHIR R4 API require OAuth 2.0 authentication using a bearer token. Unauthorized requests return 401 Unauthorized responses.
Required scopes:
familymemberhistory.readfor GETfamilymemberhistory.writefor POST, PUT, DELETE
For more information, go to: OAuth 2.0 Authentication.
Search Behavior
Searches are scoped to the authenticated tenant. The patient parameter is required for patient-scoped searches and is recommended for most search use cases.
Results are returned as a FHIR Bundle. Pagination may be applied. Use standard FHIR pagination links (Bundle.link) to retrieve additional result pages.
Note: The parameters listed below are not exhaustive and reflect commonly used fields in typical Health Gorilla workflows. Supported parameters and behavior may vary by configuration.
Frequently Used Search Parameters
| Parameter | Description | Example Values | FHIR Data Type |
|---|---|---|---|
patient | Filters by patient | Patient/{id} | Reference |
date | Filters by family member history date | ge2024-01-01, le2024-12-31 | date |
status | Filters by family member history status | partial, completed | token |
relationship | Filters by relationship of family member | father, mother, sibling | token |
condition | Filters by related condition | Condition/{id} | Reference |
Commonly Returned Resource Attributes
| Attribute | Description | Example Values | FHIR Data Type |
|---|---|---|---|
status | Current status of the family member history | completed | code |
relationship | Relationship of the family member to the patient | father | CodeableConcept |
condition | Conditions associated with the family member | Structured condition entries | BackboneElement[] |
date | Date the family member history was recorded | 2024-02-12T12:34:56Z | dateTime |
note | Additional notes or free-text information | Father had a heart attack at age 50. | Annotation[] |
Notifications
The FHIR R4 API does not provide direct resource-change subscriptions for FamilyMemberHistory. Changes to family health history information may surface through broader notification workflows, depending on enabled Health Gorilla products and configuration.
Error Handling
All FamilyMemberHistory operations follow standard Health Gorilla error handling, including use of FHIR OperationOutcome for structured responses. For more information, go to: Error Handling.