HL7 Table HL70063: Relationship

HL7 Table 0063 (Relationship) is the HL7-defined value set that encodes the social, familial, legal, and contact relationships between a patient and another person. It is most familiar from NK1-3 Relationship in next-of-kin segments, but it also appears in guarantor (GT1), insured-relationship (IN1), and emergency-contact contexts wherever a coded "this person is the patient's X" value is needed.

Purpose

Healthcare data routinely needs to express who a non-patient person is to the patient: a parent giving consent, a spouse on the insurance policy, an emergency contact, a court-appointed guardian, or simply "self." HL7 Table 0063 supplies a compact three-letter mnemonic for each role so receivers can branch on relationship deterministically — billing systems pay attention to SPO and CHD, consent engines watch for GRD and PAR, clinical alerting systems escalate on EME.

The table covers four conceptual clusters:

• Family by birth or marriage — FTH, MTH, BRO, SIS, SIB, CHD, NCH, SON, GCH, GRP, PAR, SPO, DOM, EXF.
• Family by law or arrangement — FCH, SCH, GRD, WRD, CGV, DEP.
• Non-family roles — FND, ASC, EMP, EMR, MGD, TRA, OWN, OAD.
• Administrative placeholders — SEL, NON, UNK, OTH, EME.

Where it's used

• NK1-3 Relationship — the canonical home for HL70063 in ADT, registration, and demographic messages.
• GT1-11 Guarantor Relationship — coded relationship of the guarantor to the patient on financial segments.
• IN1-17 Insured's Relationship to Patient — used on the insurance segment when the subscriber is not the patient.
• PD1, ROL, and various A28/A31 trigger flows that carry contact people.

Code list

Code system OID and canonical URI

• OID — 2.16.840.1.113883.18.42
• Canonical URI — http://terminology.hl7.org/CodeSystem/v2-0063

These two identifiers are interchangeable when populating CWE.14 (OID) or CWE.3 (HL70063 short name) on segments that carry the relationship as a coded value.

HL7-defined vs user-defined

Table 0063 is HL7-defined. The published codes are the normative set, and conformant senders must use them when a Table 0063 value is sent. The table does, however, include the safety-valve code OTH (Other) for relationships HL7 has not enumerated — for example a "guarantor's accountant" — and UNK for unknown. Local extensions outside the published codes are not permitted; if your domain needs a role HL7 does not cover, send OTH with free text in the adjacent name/comment fields rather than inventing a fourth-letter mnemonic.

Version differences

• v2.3 / v2.3.1 — Initial publication with the family roles and basic administrative codes.
• v2.5 — Added DOM (Life Partner), CGV (Caregiver), and several extended-family clarifications.
• v2.6 — TRA (Trainer), OWN (Owner), MGD (Manager) added for non-clinical role tracking.
• v2.7 / v2.7.1 — Definitions sharpened; no code additions.
• v2.8 / v2.8.1 — Stable. 33 codes, same display strings as v2.7.1.

Common mistakes

• Sending free text like Mother in NK1-3 instead of MTH. The receiver must parse the coded value, not the display string.
• Confusing CHD, NCH, SCH, and FCH. CHD is the generic — use the specific code when the relationship type is known, because downstream consent and benefits logic branches on biological vs adopted vs foster.
• Using SEL only on patient-as-subscriber but forgetting it on guarantor segments where the patient is also the guarantor. Both GT1-11 and IN1-17 use Table 0063 and both accept SEL.
• Mapping SPO to DOM (or vice versa). They are legally distinct in many jurisdictions and benefits systems treat them differently.
• Sending OTH with no free-text qualifier elsewhere in the segment. OTH without context is data-loss; pair it with text in NK1-2 or a downstream NTE.

Examples

Sample HL7 NK1 — spouse as next of kin:

NK1|1|SMITH^JANE^M|SPO^Spouse^HL70063|123 MAIN ST^^BOSTON^MA^02101||(617)555-1234^PRN^PH

Sample HL7 NK1 — emergency contact, non-family:

NK1|2|JOHNSON^ROBERT|EME^Emergency Contact^HL70063|||(617)555-9876^EMR^PH

FHIR Coding JSON — RelatedPerson.relationship:

{
  "relationship": [
    {
      "coding": [
        {
          "system": "http://terminology.hl7.org/CodeSystem/v2-0063",
          "code": "SPO",
          "display": "Spouse"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Mapping failure — sender populates display only:

NK1|1|SMITH^JANE|Spouse|...

The receiver sees no coded value in NK1-3.1, cannot resolve Spouse as a code (it is not in HL70063 — the code is SPO), and either drops the relationship or routes the message to a curation queue. The fix is to populate SPO^Spouse^HL70063.

FHIR mapping

The HL7 v2-to-FHIR Implementation Guide maps Table 0063 onto RelatedPerson.relationship, a CodeableConcept. The IG's preferred target ValueSet is http://hl7.org/fhir/ValueSet/relatedperson-relationshiptype, which itself draws from the v3 code system PersonalRelationshipRoleType for family-role concepts and from ContactRelationship for emergency-contact concepts.

IG reference: ConceptMap-table-hl70063-to-v3-rolecode.

Engine considerations

• Bidirectional translation — engines that bridge v2 to FHIR need both directions: HL70063 → v3 RoleCode on egress, and v3 → HL70063 on ingest from FHIR-native sources. Caching the 33-row table avoids repeated lookups.
• Specificity preservation — when a sender uses CHD and the FHIR target requires biological/foster/step disambiguation, the engine must either escalate or default explicitly; silent assumption breaks consent logic.
• SEL collapse — on GT1/IN1, SEL means the related person IS the patient. The engine should not create a separate RelatedPerson resource in FHIR; instead, it should suppress the resource and point benefit/guarantor references back at the Patient.
• Unknown handling — UNK and NON map to FHIR data-absent-reason / nullFlavor, not to a literal RelatedPerson.

How Vorro handles HL70063

Vorro treats HL70063 as a closed, versioned vocabulary cached at startup. Inbound NK1-3, GT1-11, and IN1-17 are normalized against the v2.8.1 table; unrecognized values are surfaced as OTH with the original value preserved in the audit log and a soft warning emitted. On outbound FHIR generation, Vorro uses the IG ConceptMap to translate to RelatedPerson.relationship, preserves the original v2 Coding alongside the FHIR-native v3 Coding on the same CodeableConcept, and special-cases SEL by suppressing the RelatedPerson resource entirely.

Related pages

• NK1 segment — Next of Kin / Associated Parties
• CWE data type — Coded With Exceptions
• HL7 Table 0200 — Name Type

Sources

• terminology.hl7.org — CodeSystem v2-0063
• HL7 v2 product brief
• HL7 v2-to-FHIR IG — ConceptMap Table 0063 to Relationship