HL7 Table HL70006: Religion

HL70006 is an HL7-defined code table carrying a patient's stated religious affiliation. It is the value set behind PID-17 Religion on every patient demographic message, and is also referenced from NK1-31 (Next of Kin Contact Person's Religion) in modern profiles. The table has grown steadily across HL7 v2 revisions — from a handful of denominations in v2.1 to roughly eighty codes in v2.8.1 — and remains one of the most commonly extended HL7-defined tables in practice.

Purpose

HL70006 records a patient-stated religious affiliation used for chaplaincy, dietary, end-of-life, and cultural-care workflows. It is not a clinical observation; it is self-reported demographic data captured at registration. A value of CAT (Roman Catholic) is a label the patient asked the registrar to record, not a sacramental status the hospital has verified.

Because PID-17 drives chaplain pages, dietary restrictions (kosher trays for JEW, halal for ISL, vegetarian defaults for HIN and BUD), and last-rites workflows, accurate coding has direct clinical consequence even though the field itself is administrative.

Where it's used

PID-17 Religion — the canonical home of HL70006, populated on ADT, ORM, and SIU messages that carry a patient.
NK1-31 Contact Person's Religion — next-of-kin religion on the NK1 segment (used for clergy notification of family members).
Some profiles also reference HL70006 from PV1 add-on segments for inpatient pastoral-care routing.

Code list

The table below lists the most common HL70006 codes in v2.8.1. The full set is extensive (~80+ codes including granular Christian denominations, Jewish movements, and world religions); a representative subset is shown.

Code	Display	Comment/Description
ABC	Adventist Christian	Seventh-day Adventist and related Adventist traditions.
AGN	Agnostic	Patient identifies as agnostic.
AME	African Methodist Episcopal	AME and AME Zion churches.
ATH	Atheist	Patient identifies as atheist.
BAH	Baha'i	Baha'i Faith.
BAP	Baptist	Baptist denominations broadly.
BUD	Buddhist	Buddhist (no sect distinction).
CAT	Roman Catholic	The most-used HL70006 code in U.S. acute care.
CHR	Christian	Christian, unspecified denomination.
CMI	Christian Mind Sciences	Christian Science, Religious Science, Unity.
EOR	Eastern Orthodox	Greek, Russian, Antiochian, etc.
EPI	Episcopalian	Episcopal Church / Anglican Communion U.S.
EVA	Evangelical	Evangelical Christian.
FRQ	Friends (Quaker)	Religious Society of Friends.
HIN	Hindu	Hindu (no sect distinction).
HUM	Humanist	Secular humanism.
ISL	Muslim (Islam)	Muslim, no sect distinction.
JCO	Jehovah's Witness	Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. Clinically significant for blood-product refusal.
JEW	Jewish	Jewish, no movement specified.
JLB	Jewish Liberal	Liberal/Reconstructionist Jewish.
JOR	Jewish Orthodox	Orthodox Jewish.
JRC	Jewish Conservative	Conservative Jewish.
JRF	Jewish Reform	Reform Jewish.
LUT	Lutheran	Lutheran denominations.
MEN	Mennonite	Mennonite / Amish.
MET	Methodist	United Methodist and related.
MOR	Mormon	Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
NAM	Native American	Native American traditional religion.
NON	No Affiliation	Patient stated no religious affiliation.
OTH	Other	Patient's religion is named but not in HL70006.
PEN	Pentecostal	Pentecostal denominations.
PRO	Protestant	Protestant, unspecified denomination.
PRS	Presbyterian	Presbyterian denominations.
QUA	Quaker	Alias for FRQ in some profiles; FRQ is preferred.
REF	Reformed	Reformed Church traditions.
SAA	Salvation Army	Salvation Army.
SHN	Shinto	Shinto.
SIK	Sikh	Sikh.
TAO	Taoist	Taoist.
UNI	Unitarian Universalist	UU Association.
UNK	Unknown	Religion was not asked or patient declined to answer.
VAR	Various	Patient affiliates with multiple traditions.

The full HL70006 set published on the HL7 Terminology server contains additional codes for granular denominations (Coptic Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, multiple Baptist conventions, Wesleyan, Nazarene, Church of God variants, Jain, Zoroastrian, Confucian, Wiccan/Pagan, etc.). Vorro recommends consulting the live HL7 Terminology server for the complete enumeration.

Code system OID

OID: 2.16.840.1.113883.18.8
Canonical URI: http://terminology.hl7.org/CodeSystem/v2-0006

The OID resolves on the HL7 Terminology server and is the value Vorro emits in CWE.14 when downstream profiles demand OID-bound coded values.

HL7-defined vs user-defined

HL70006 is HL7-defined — the table number sits inside the HL7-reserved range (HL70001–HL70999) and the code set is normative. However, HL70006 is one of the most commonly extended HL7-defined tables in real-world deployments because the published list, while large, still omits many regional traditions. Sites that need codes for, say, Druze, Yazidi, or specific Indigenous traditions sometimes add local codes in violation of conformance. The HL7-blessed escape valve is OTH (Other) plus a free-text qualifier in CWE.2 or an associated NTE — not a private extension to HL70006.

Version differences

v2.1 – v2.2 — A short list of ~20 mostly U.S.-Christian denominations plus JEW, ISL, HIN, BUD.
v2.3 — Expanded to include more world religions and Jewish movement subdivisions (JLB, JOR, JRC, JRF).
v2.4 – v2.5 — Added humanist/secular categories (HUM, AGN, ATH) and Christian Mind Sciences (CMI).
v2.6 — Added additional Orthodox subdivisions and minor Christian sects.
v2.7 – v2.8 — Field type on PID-17 moved from CE to CWE, enabling OID-bound transmission.
v2.8.1 — Stable at roughly 80 codes; no breaking changes from v2.8.

Common mistakes

Sending the display word in PID-17 — Catholic instead of CAT. PID-17 carries the code, not the label.
Treating PID-17 as a clinical or sacramental record. A CAT value does not mean the chaplain may administer last rites without family consent; it is a demographic flag, not a permission.
Mapping every Jewish patient to JEW and losing the movement distinction. JOR (Orthodox) carries dietary and sabbath restrictions that JRF (Reform) does not, and conflating them defeats the dietary-tray workflow.
Inventing local codes (SAT, NEO, vendor abbreviations) instead of using OTH plus free text. This breaks downstream FHIR mapping and HL7 conformance.
Defaulting unknown religion to NON (No Affiliation) instead of UNK (Unknown). The two are semantically different: NON is a stated atheism-or-similar; UNK means the question was not asked or the patient declined.

Examples

A PID with religion CAT:

PID|1||10456^^^MRN^MR||DOE^JANE^A||19850412|F|||123 MAIN ST^^BOSTON^MA^02118||(617)555-1212||EN|S|CAT|10456|123-45-6789

A v2.7+ CWE-typed PID-17 with OID metadata:

PID|1||10456^^^MRN^MR||DOE^JANE||19850412|F|||||||EN|S|CAT^Roman Catholic^HL70006^^^^2.8.1^^^^2.16.840.1.113883.18.8

A Jehovah's Witness patient (clinically significant for blood-product refusal — engines often raise a soft alert):

PID|1||77881^^^MRN^MR||SMITH^JOHN||19720815|M|||||||EN|M|JCO|77881

FHIR representation as a Patient.extension carrying v3 ReligiousAffiliation:

{
  "resourceType": "Patient",
  "id": "10456",
  "extension": [{
    "url": "http://hl7.org/fhir/StructureDefinition/patient-religion",
    "valueCodeableConcept": {
      "coding": [{
        "system": "http://terminology.hl7.org/CodeSystem/v3-ReligiousAffiliation",
        "code": "1013",
        "display": "Roman Catholic Church"
      }]
    }
  }]
}

Mapping failure example — local extension:

PID|1||10456^^^MRN^MR||DOE^JANE||19850412|F|||||||EN|S|DRUZE

DRUZE is not in HL70006. A conformant engine should route the message to a curation queue, preserve DRUZE in the audit log, and emit FHIR with OTH plus a valueCodeableConcept.text of "Druze" rather than silently dropping the value.

FHIR mapping

The HL7 v2-to-FHIR Implementation Guide publishes ConceptMap-table-hl70006-to-v3-religiousaffiliation, which translates HL70006 three-letter codes to the numeric v3 ReligiousAffiliation code system. The mapping is many-to-one in places (the four Jewish movement codes all sit under Judaism in v3) and lossy in others (some v2 codes have no exact v3 equivalent and fall back to 1077 Other).

The FHIR carrier is Patient.extension with URL http://hl7.org/fhir/StructureDefinition/patient-religion (US Core and several national IGs use this slot). The bound ValueSet is http://terminology.hl7.org/ValueSet/v3-ReligiousAffiliation.

HL7 v2 (HL70006)	v3 ReligiousAffiliation
CAT	1013 Roman Catholic Church
JEW	1032 Judaism
ISL	1023 Islam
BUD	1059 Buddhist
HIN	1022 Hindu
JCO	1027 Jehovah's Witness
NON	1007 No religious affiliation
OTH	1077 Other
UNK	(no v3 equivalent — emit data-absent-reason)

Engine considerations

Case sensitivity — HL70006 codes are case-sensitive uppercase three-letter symbols; cat is not valid. Normalize on ingest.
CWE upgrade — In v2.7+ profiles PID-17 is CWE, allowing OID metadata. Engines must accept both CE and CWE shapes.
JCO alerts — Jehovah's Witness affiliation often triggers a blood-product refusal flag downstream. Engines should preserve JCO faithfully and not collapse to a generic Christian code.
Round-trip preservation — When mapping to v3 ReligiousAffiliation, store the original HL70006 three-letter code as an extension so the v2 outbound channel can restore the original distinction (especially the four JEW movement subdivisions).
Free-text companion — When OTH is sent, expect and preserve CWE.2 free-text qualifier; FHIR consumers will read it from valueCodeableConcept.text.

How Vorro handles HL70006

Vorro validates PID-17 against the full published HL70006 code set on ingest. Recognized codes pass through to all downstream channels. Unrecognized values — local extensions, lowercase variants, free-text religion names — are routed to the terminology curation queue, where they are either remapped to one of the canonical codes (with a remap rule created) or downgraded to OTH with the original string preserved in CWE.2.

On outbound, Vorro emits HL70006 as CE for v2.5 and earlier profiles and as CWE with CWE.14 populated (2.16.840.1.113883.18.8) for v2.7+ destinations. For FHIR outbound channels Vorro applies the published v2-to-FHIR ConceptMap and stores the original HL70006 code in a round-trip extension so the v2 channel can restore Jewish movement distinctions and similar fine-grained codes.

Sources

← Back to HL7 v2 Guide