Encounter

The Encounter is the concept HIEBus uses to encapsulate specific patient interactions with the health system including inpatient visits, outpatient visits, emergency visits, future appointments, and virtual encounters such as phone calls. Encounters are used as input to real time alerting as well as population health analytics and quality measures.

HIEBus does not manage a separate Record Authority or assigning authority for encounter identifier. Instead, the identifier for encounters is only referenced in combination with the patient associated with that encounter. The unique encounter identifier in HIEBus is Record Authority, Patient Identifier, and Encounter Identifier.

The correct classification of encounters into inpatient, outpatient, emergency, recurring, etc. is key to both HIEBus Beacon alerting and Galileo population health analytics. HIEBus relies on values in line with HL7’s suggested values for patient class in user-defined table 0004. Systems submitting data to HIEBus are encouraged to use that value set.

Value	Description
E	Emergency
I	Inpatient
O	Outpatient
P	Preadmit
R	Recurring
B	Obstetrics
C	Commercial
N	Not Applicable
U	Unknown

If other values are used for patient class a dictionary will need to be provided by the sending organization.

	Field	Type	Length	Allow Null	Natural Key	Description
1	Record Type ID	String				Indicates the record type. For this record it will always be “Encounter”.
2	Patient ID	REF				Surrogate key to a patientCorresponds to a (Patient line in the same file set)’s ID value
3	Encounter ID	ID				Surrogate Key for encounter
4	Identifier	String	128			Natural Key Identifier. Typically, the sources key Identifier for an encounter. Could be visit number from a Hospital or a claim number from a claims management system
5	Admit Date	Date
6	Discharge Date	Date
7	Patient Class	Term				For Example - E, I, O, P – see Patient class table above
8	Admission Type	Term				code|name|namespace|family|ns desc
9	Discharge Type	Term				code|name|namespace|family|ns desc
10	Hospital Service	Term				code|name|namespace|family|ns desc
11	VIP Indicator	Term				code|name|namespace|family|ns desc
12	Patient Type	Term				code|name|namespace|family|ns desc
13	DRG	Term				code|name|namespace|family|ns desc
14	Access Policy Name	String	50			CAN BE LEFT BLANK, BUT WILL BE SET TO A DEFAULT ACCESS POLICY. Access Policy name – pre coordinated value to determine access rites
15	Patient Identifier	String	128			Part of Natural Key Identifier. Typically, the source’s or practice’s key Identifier for a patient *Natural Key for existing patient
16	Patient Record Authority ID	REF				Surrogate Key to a Record Authority.
17	Eligibility Date	Date
18	Current As Of Date	Date
19	Hospital Number	String	20
20	Inserted Audit Data	Audit				Audit data for when the record was inserted/created
21	Last Modified Audit Data	Audit				Audit data for when the record was last modified
22	Admit Source Term	Term
23	Admit Source Text	String	200
24	Admit Source Alternate Terms	Term List				See Term List Format – List of terms
25	Data Source	Data Source	50|MAX			Code|Name. See Data Source Format - Source of the data