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

Fact of Death Home Page

Official URL: http://example.org/fhir/us/fod/ImplementationGuide/example.fhir.us.fod Version: 0.2.0
IG Standards status: Informative Maturity Level: 1 Computable Name: FactOfDeathExchange

Introduction

This IG provides guidance on how fact-of-death notifications can be sent to providers and potentially other clinical systems using FHIR. For example, Vital Records Offices can use this IG to send fact-of-death notifications to EHRs where that patient was seen. By enabling providers to learn promptly and reliably that a patient has died, these fact of death notifications will support active coordination of care and discontinuation of outreach.

Technical Overview

This implementation guide defines the FHIR resources, profiles, and exchange patterns used by parties like Vital Records Offices to communicate a registered death event back to providers that previously cared for the decedent or other interested parties. This IG is a complement to the existing Vital Records Death Reporting (VRDR) and Vital Records Common Library (VRCL) FHIR IGs. If a patient's death isn't recorded at a given healthcare facility with that patient's records, there are many compounding negative effects including communication with families, chart accuracy, and resource allocation.

The artifacts available in the guide include profiles for a notification bundle conveying the identity of the patient decedent, the fact and date/time of death, place of death, and patient matching demographics sufficient for receiving systems to match the notification to a patient record. It reuses decedent demographic profiles from the Vital Records Common Library and event profiles from VRDR.

Many electronic exchanges including this one do necessitate the need to ensure appropriate patient identification so that information is being sent to the correct locations and matched to any pre-existing records. The specific details of that patient identification or source of identification information is out of scope for this work item, though we will ensure that the breadth of common demographics required for safe nationwide matching will be considered as the IG is put together.

The main sections of this IG are:

  • Background - business context implementers should be familiar with before reading the remainder of the IG.
  • Detailed Specification - the actors, message events, notification content, and conformance expectations implementers are expected to implement.
  • Artifact Index - the profiles, terminology, message definitions, and examples defined by this guide.
  • Downloads - a downloadable copy of this implementation guide and other useful information.

Authors

Name Email/URL
HL7 International - Public Health http://www.hl7.org/Special/committees/pher
Natan Shpringman, Epic nshpring@epic.com