In FHIR, the Patient resource contains an address field. However, if the patient is removed, the address is also discarded. Is there a way for location information to persist?
We are developing a system for community health workers. CHWs visit homes periodically. They cover locations — and consequently, beneficiaries who reside in those locations. Hence, there is a need to be able to persistently store locations (beneficiary home addresses) in our system, and link them to current occupants (beneficiaries).
The Location resource points to Organization. The only way it connects to a Patient resource is via an Encounter. This does not suffice.
Also, I also reviewed the Group resource, to try to connect a family or household (of beneficiaries) to a Location. However, that too did not yield any results. My takeway was that Group could either group locations, or group patients.
It's not something commonly done by most systems, so you won't likely find a 'core' element for it. However, it's perfectly reasonable to do via an extension. Simply define an extension on Patient with a type of Reference that refers to the Location record for the house/apartment building/whatever granularity you track.