a system and method for determining family relationships between related individuals for use on electronic medical records in which a first person may provide identifiers of self and / or family members to be associated with the emr of the first person and a second person may give permission so that information from the emr of the second person may be shared with the emr of the first person based on a family relationship , whereby emr record systems may communicate with each other and / or with an external database in order to determine the family relationships and to determine what information may be shared based on the determined family relationships and permissions .