This page is part of the Vital Records Death Reporting FHIR Implementation Guide (v3.0.0: STU3) based on FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) R4. This is the current published version. For a full list of available versions, see the Directory of published versions

Usage

Miscellaneous Comments

• Missing or Required Data: The resources in this IG are designed to support a variety of use cases, each with its own rules about what data elements are required. The focus on this IG has been how to represent data elements used in death reporting, not whether a particular data element is required in a particular exchange. This IG has a high degree of optionality among and within its data profiles. Implementers of this IG should specify their own rules for missing or required data elements.
• Guidance on Must Support: Pursuant to the above-described high level of optionality in this IG, no additonal must-support flags have been specified beyond those established by the US Core base profiles. Use-case specific business rules that are outside of this IG will be used by recipients of data to determine if necessary data is missing.
• Support for Legacy Inter-Jurisdictional Exchange (IJE) fields:
  • This IG aims to support all data elements in use for exchange of death records among jurisdictional vital records offices, and between vital records offices and NCHS.
  • The mapping of data elements to FHIR data elements is provided by data dictionaries. Any data element for which there was any evidence of use was mapped.
  • Some data elements have been deprecated, and are not supported.

Usage Notes in Vital Records Common Library

Usage notes for extensions that have been transitioned from VRDR to VRCL are found in VRCL's usage page.

Alias, Replace, Void Actions

The ALIAS and VOID IJE fields are used to direct an action be performed on a death record. These actions are now specified through message types in the accompanying Vital Records Messaging Implementation Guide message descriptions for Alias and Void. Sending a replacement death record is also specified through the Replace message type, but the status of the replacement is mapped to the VRDR IG (see DeathCertificate).

Local Time

All event times should be recorded as the local time and local time zone where they took place.

Decedent Name

Profile conformance requires that either a first, last, or middle name be provided based on US Core requirements. If no name components are available, a data absent reason should be provided for at least one name component in order to conform to the profile requirements.

NCHS submission requires only a last name. Last name is required for NCHS submission. If the decedent's legal name is unknown, name.family should be reported as 'UNKNOWN', or omitted. Placeholder names such as 'John Doe' or 'Jane Doe' should not be reported.

Birthplace State and Country

Recording birthplace state and country is described in Instruction Manual Part 8a (2004), Section I.

address.country	address.state	BPLACE_CNT	BPLACE_ST	Comment
US or CA	Valid 2-letter state	Same as FHIR	Same as FHIR
US	Invalid code, Blank, or UNK	US	ZZ	UNK is equivalent to ZZ.
CA	Invalid, Blank, or UNK	CA	XX
Other valid country code (except ZZ, and obviously US and CA)	All values.	Same as FHIR	XX
ZZ or other invalid values	All values.	ZZ	ZZ	ZZ is a valid country code in the valueset.