There are four search parameters in FHIR for searching based on a HumanName. ‘given’ and ‘family’ are self explanatory.
‘name’ is the wildcard that allows you to search for a string across all of the HumanName fields.
The fourth search parameter — the one you may be unfamiliar with — is ‘phonetic’. A phonetic search is traditionally based on pronunciation and doesn’t require an exact spelling match.
If a FHIR server has implemented the ‘phonetic’ search parameter, I would expect a search for the name Smit to also return entries for all the Smiths in the system.
We can test this using the Hapi test server here:
http://hapi.fhir.org/baseR4/Patient/?phonetic=smit&_total=accurate
The first page of results contain a mixture patients named Smit and Smith.
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