Existing Wording \\Patient.animal

Comments
The inclusion of animal in the Patient is an indication of RIM-based design by constraint approach to resource design. In the applications that I have been able to survey, not one has a need to mix human and non-human patients in either an exchange or in the back end repositories. If you were to apply the 80% 'rule' you would create a Patient resource and a NonHumanPatient resource.

Grahame's Comments
There are many such systems; I managed one. We did create a patient and animal resource, but in the end this proved too difficult, and after much debate and trying several options, we elected to go with this least worst design

Disposition
Not Persuasive

Disposition Comment
There are examples of systems that mix human and non-human. Furthermore, human-based software can be used in animal-specific settings. There was a conscious decision in this situation to not follow the 80% rule to make clear that FHIR was intended to support veterinary care. The alternative - having a separate resource for animal patients would have required every reference to patient to instead reference two alternate near-identical resources. This complexity wasn't justified.