Fact of Death Exchange FHIR Implementation Guide
0.2.0 - CI Build United States of America flag

Fact of Death Exchange FHIR Implementation Guide, published by HL7 International - Public Health Work Group. This guide is not an authorized publication; it is the continuous build for version 0.2.0 built by the FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) CI Build. This version is based on the current content of https://github.com/shpringman/fhir-fod/ and changes regularly. See the Directory of published versions

Background

Page standards status: Informative

This page provides the business context an implementer should have before reading the Detailed Specification. It is a shell awaiting content from the work group.

Why fact-of-death notification matters

To be written. When a patient's death is not recorded at a facility that holds their chart, the consequences compound: outreach and recall letters continue to be sent to the deceased, families receive appointment reminders and bills, the chart is inaccurate for anyone who later reads it, and panel and resource planning are computed against patients who are no longer living.

Relationship to VRDR and VRCL

To be written. This guide is a complement to the Vital Records Death Reporting (VRDR) and Vital Records Common Library (VRCL) implementation guides rather than a replacement for either. VRDR describes reporting a death to vital records; this guide describes notifying providers from vital records. Decedent demographics are reused from VRCL and the death event profiles from VRDR, so that a jurisdiction is not maintaining two incompatible representations of the same decedent.

Current state and what it costs

To be written. Describe how providers learn of deaths today, the delay involved, and what is missed.

Scope

To be written. State plainly what is in scope and what is not. In particular, the specific mechanism and source of patient identification is out of scope, though the guide does constrain the breadth of demographics carried so that safe nationwide matching is possible.