Vital Records Common Library (VRCL) STU2-ballot, published by HL7 International / Public Health. This guide is not an authorized publication; it is the continuous build for version 2.0.0 built by the FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) CI Build. This version is based on the current content of https://github.com/HL7/vr-common-library/ and changes regularly. See the Directory of published versions
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) Division of Vital Statics (DVS) is currently transitioning to FHIR-based submission of vital records to the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) as part of ongoing modernization efforts. CDC/NCHS/DVS funds the development of the FHIR IGs for submission submission of death, birth and fetal death records, manages the NVSS Community of Practice (CoP), and holds quarterly testing events. Vital records offices (VROs) participate in these testing events with some on the path to pre-certification as a milestone for moving into production submission via FHIR to NVSS.
NCHS is transitioning the submission of death, birth, and fetal death records by VROs to NCHS based on published FHIR IGs, starting with submission of death records.
FHIR Implementation Collaborative led by the CDC Foundation is working with CDC/NCHS’s Collaborating Office for Medical Examiners and Coroners (COMEC) to test and pilot FHIR-based Application Programming Interface (API) enabled data exchange for medicolegal death investigation workflows. This effort is a collaboration with MDI offices and identified partners: state vital records offices, toxicology labs and/or other entities. It funds development of the Medicolegal Death Investigation (MDI) FHIR IG as well as collaborative testing events with MDI sites.
This FHIR IG is part of NCHS's efforts to facilitate the transition to FHIR through reuse of resources, and standardization of documentation.
The goals of FHIR IG development and harmonization are:
Achieving the goals for harmonization listed above required modification to the content of previous versions of IGs, development of new content, and transition of content between the IGs. This reduced the proliferation of content across the set of IGs that was due to redundancy and near-redundancy.
Figure 1 shows the dependencies among published vital reocrds FHIR IGs. Figure 2 shows the dependencies after harmonization. Harmonization has resulted in significant simplification of the MDI IG, and consolidation of all general Vital Records specific content within the VRCL.
To implement the goals of harmonization described above, the following content changes were made: