Patient Visit

The facility ID, the optional fourth component of each patient location field, is a HD data type that is uniquely associated with the healthcare facility containing the location. A given institution, or group of intercommunicating institutions, should establish a list of facilities that may be potential assignors of patient locations. The list will be one of the institution's master dictionary lists. Since third parties other than the assignors of patient locations may send or receive HL7 messages containing patient locations, the facility ID in the patient location may not be the same as that implied by the sending and receiving systems identified in the MSH. The facility ID must be unique across facilities at a given site. This field is required for HL7 implementations that have more than a single healthcare facility with bed locations, since the same <point of care> ^ <room> ^ <bed> combination may exist at more than one facility.