[a-priori]

What's the purpose of structured modelling of names? Why does it matter which parts are family vs given vs whatever else? Lots of the W3C International Examples they give use a `<text>` field. Why not just use that?

https://www.hl7.org/fhir/datatypes-examples.html#2.24.1.13.1

[nradov]

It matters for collation order, if you want to show a list of patients sorted by family name.

[Piskvorrr]

Is this a current use case, or did that just make sense 100 years ago? (As in these assumptions: "tracking actual relationships in data is Hard, and family name correlates strongly with real-world relationships") I mean, it sort of works even today, but neither of the assumptions are as strong any more.

[nradov]

It's still a current use case for healthcare provider workflows. Also helps a lot when doing automated record linkage between different systems.