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by nradov 2419 days ago
It matters for collation order, if you want to show a list of patients sorted by family name.
1 comments

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