Vital Records Common Library (VRCL) STU2-ballot
2.0.0-ballot - ballot United States of America flag

This page is part of the Vital Records Common Profile Library (v2.0.0-ballot: STU 2 Ballot 1) based on FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) R4. The current version which supersedes this version is 1.1.0. For a full list of available versions, see the Directory of published versions

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Official URL: http://hl7.org/fhir/us/vr-common-library/ImplementationGuide/hl7.fhir.us.vr-common-library Version: 2.0.0-ballot
Draft as of 2023-12-16 Computable Name: VitalRecordsCommonLibrary

January 2024 Ballot of STU2

This STU2 ballot addresses the following:

  • Reorganization of vital-records related content and harmonization to reduce redunancy and near redundancy. See Vital Records IG Harmonization.
  • This reorganization and harmonization includes
    • Addition of profiles supporting NCHS-standard submission of race, ethnicity, industry and occupation inputs, and return of coded race and ethnicity.
    • Inclusion of extensions used by multiple vital-records related FHIR IGs (e.g., partial dates, coded address components)
    • Movement of content (i.e., profiles, valuesets, examples) that is used exclusively in the birth and fetal death use cases to the Birth and Fetal Death Reporting IG. As a result, the total content of this IG has seeminly shrunk.
    • Inclusion of valuesets formerly hosted in PHINVADs. This follows the pattern established by the VRDR IG.

    For a description of the changes to VRCL from STU1.1, see the Change table.

Key updates and detailed changes between this and prior versions are available on the VRCL Change Log and Changes Between Versions pages.

Overview

This guide is a FHIR Resources (FHIR) Library to support the needs of multiple Vital Records Implementation Guides (IGs) as well as the needs of related IGs. It does not provide any use case or scenario specific content or additional guidance on how to use these artifacts, but serves as a source for a standard set of profiles, extensions, codesystems and valuesets for reuse in multiple use case specific implementation guides focusing on the exchange of Vital Records information. Implementation details such as how and when to use a given artifact will be supplied in these guides.

Background

The initial development of the STU1 version of this IG was motivated by the opportunity for reuse between the Birth and Fetal Death Reporting (BFDR) and Birth Defects Reporting (BDR) IGs. Following publication of STU1 versions of BFDR and Medicolegal and Death Investigation (MDI), an STU2 version of Vital Records Death Reporting (VRDR) , we have taken a broader view of reuse within these IGs as well as the anticipated needs of the as-yet unballoted BDR to develop the STU2 content for this IG. This process is described in Vital Records IG Harmonization.

Many of the profiles previously included to support BDR have been moved to the companion STU2 version of BFDR, and the content of this IG has been focused on FHIR resources that were redundantly defined across BFDR, VRDR and MDI, representing the vital records approach to common data elements. VRDR is the most mature of the vital records related FHIR IGs, having already moved into production usage by several jurisdictions and NCHS, and some of the patterns for FHIR implementation that were defined in the VRDR IG have been incorporated in the STU2 version of VRCL, and its companion STU2 version of BFDR. These patterns include definition of codesystems and valuesets within this IG, in lieu of reference to Public Health Information Network Vocabulary Access and Distribution System (PHIN VADS), support for “edit flags” within existing profiles, in lieu of additional companion Observation profiles, and standardized extensions for partial dates and times, and coded components of addresses.

This profile library will provide a standard framework for inclusion by reference in multiple use case specific IGs (i.e., BFDR, BDR, VRDR, MDI) to support interoperability among public health systems and reduce provider and implementer burden, and to streamline maintenance of the IGs.

How to Read This Guide

This Guide is divided into several pages which are listed at the top of each page in the menu bar.

  • Home: provides the introduction and background for this I
  • Artifacts: provides a list of the FHIR artifacts (profiles, examples, and value sets) defined as part of this guide.
  • Specification: provides general information about the FHIR specification
  • Usage: provides notes that are referenced by resources in this IG, and their uses in other IGs.
  • Change Log: provides a change history
  • STU1.1 to STU2 Changes: shows the provenance of all resources included in the STU2 version of this IG, as well as all of the disposition of the resources no longer included in this IG.
  • Downloads: provides links to downloadable artifacts.

Authors

Name Email/URL
HL7 International - Public Health http://www.hl7.org/Special/committees/pher