Patient identifier - not present

1

Hello,

We have a use case where we need to know why a health card number is not present to determine if this is something that needs to be pursued or not.

We would like to use the “data absent reason” extension for patient.identifier.

  1. Use “unknown” for those cases where it is expected that a patient should have a valid health card number.

  2. Use “not applicable” for those cases where it is not expected that a patient would have a valid health card number (e.g. non-resident of Canada).

Currently, “not applicable” is not part of the value set for data absent reason and binding is set to “required”. Can we pre-adopt inclusion of “not applicable” in the value set/code system?

Thanks

2

Well, you can submit a change request. If the change request gets approved (which might only take a week or two if you can show up on one of the Work Group calls and nudge it towards discussion or ask for it to be included in a block vote), then you’re somewhat safe in pre-adopting it, though all of the validation tools will reject instances that contain it as invalid unless you point them at a release of the specification that contains the new code.

3

Thanks Lloyd. I have added this tracker request: https://gforge.hl7.org/gf/project/fhir/tracker/?action=TrackerItemEdit&tracker_item_id=13775

Finnie