HL7 Table HL70112: Discharge Disposition

HL70112 is one of the most consequential HL7-defined code tables for revenue-cycle and care-coordination workflows. It carries the patient discharge status — where the patient went, or what happened, when the encounter ended. It sits behind PV1-36 Discharge Disposition on every ADT^A03 (Discharge) and on the financial messages that follow. The values are two-digit numeric codes harmonized with the National Uniform Billing Committee (NUBC) UB-04 patient discharge status set, and there are 23 of them in v2.8.1.

Purpose

HL70112 records the disposition of the patient at the end of the inpatient or outpatient encounter. It drives billing (Medicare and Medicaid require it on every UB-04 claim), care-coordination (home health and SNF referrals fire off the value), quality reporting (mortality cohorts use 20, 40, 41, 42), and operational dashboards (length-of-stay denominators, readmission cohorts).

Because HL70112 is harmonized with the NUBC patient discharge status code set, the codes mean exactly what the UB-04 manual says they mean. Implementers must not invent local interpretations — for example, code 02 means transfer to another short-term general hospital, not transfer to any external facility. Long-term care, psychiatric, rehab, SNF, ICF, hospice, and Critical Access all have their own dedicated codes.

Where it's used

• PV1-36 Discharge Disposition — the canonical home of HL70112, populated on every ADT^A03 Discharge and ADT^A08 Update that closes an encounter.
• PV1-37 Discharged to Location — a separate field that names the receiving facility; PV1-36 names the category, PV1-37 names the place.
• DFT financial messages and BAR billing-update messages frequently echo PV1-36 onto charge events for claim assembly.

Code list

Code system OID

• OID: 2.16.840.1.113883.18.34
• Canonical URI: http://terminology.hl7.org/CodeSystem/v2-0112

The OID resolves on the HL7 Terminology server. The underlying numeric code set is owned and maintained by the National Uniform Billing Committee (NUBC); HL7 v2 republishes the NUBC codes verbatim. Vorro emits the HL7 OID in CWE.14 when a downstream profile demands OID-bound coded values for PV1-36.

HL7-defined vs user-defined

HL70112 is HL7-defined, but its content is externally normative — the codes are owned by NUBC, and HL7 republishes them. The table number falls inside the HL7-reserved range (HL70001–HL70999), and the code set is closed: receivers must accept all defined values without local extension, and senders must not invent additional codes. When NUBC adds, retires, or revises a code, HL7 picks up the change in the next v2 revision.

Version differences

• v2.1 – v2.2 — Eight values: 01–07 and 20 (Expired). Sufficient for early UB-82 era billing.
• v2.3 — 08 (Home IV), 09 (Admitted as inpatient), and 30 (Still patient) added.
• v2.3.1 — 40, 41, 42 (Expired at home / in medical facility / place unknown) added to support mortality reporting cohorts.
• v2.4 — 50, 51 (Hospice home / medical facility) added as hospice became a distinct level of care.
• v2.5 — 61 (Swing bed), 62 (Inpatient rehab), 63 (Long term care hospital), 64 (Medicaid nursing facility), 65 (Psychiatric hospital), 70 (Other health care institution) added as Medicare post-acute distinctions matured.
• v2.6 — 66 (Critical Access Hospital) added following the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility Program.
• v2.7 – v2.8.1 — Set frozen at 23 codes; no further additions, though NUBC has added codes (e.g., 81 Discharged to court/law enforcement, 82–95 various transfer-with-planned-readmission variants) that newer profiles carry as user-defined extensions until HL7 republishes.

Common mistakes

• Sending the display word in PV1-36 — Home or Expired instead of 01 or 20. PV1-36 is IS (or CWE in modern profiles), and the code value is the two-digit numeric symbol.
• Using 01 (Routine home) for a patient who actually went home with home health. Home health is 06. Billing audits catch this and downcode the claim.
• Using 02 (Transfer to short-term general) for any external transfer. SNF is 03, ICF is 04, rehab is 62, LTCH is 63, psych is 65, CAH is 66. Each has its own code.
• Confusing 40/41/42 (Expired at specific location) with 20 (Expired). Modern claims require the location-specific expired codes; bare 20 is increasingly rejected.
• Extending HL70112 locally with site-specific transfer destinations. The right move is to populate PV1-37 Discharged to Location with the specific facility while leaving PV1-36 on the closest NUBC category.

Examples

A routine discharge home:

PV1|1|I|2W^201^A^ST LUKES|R|||1234^SMITH^JOHN^A|||MED||||1||||V|10456^^^FIN||||||||||||||||||||||||||||01

Discharge with home health follow-up:

PV1|1|I|2W^201^A^ST LUKES|R|||1234^SMITH^JOHN^A|||MED||||1||||V|10456^^^FIN||||||||||||||||||||||||||||06|VNA^Visiting Nurse Association

Transfer to a Critical Access Hospital:

PV1|1|I|2W^201^A^ST LUKES|E|||1234^SMITH^JOHN^A|||MED||||1||||V|10456^^^FIN||||||||||||||||||||||||||||66|RURAL_CAH^Rural Critical Access Hospital

Same 06 value translated to a FHIR Encounter.hospitalization snippet:

{
  "resourceType": "Encounter",
  "id": "enc-10456",
  "hospitalization": {
    "dischargeDisposition": {
      "coding": [{
        "system": "http://terminology.hl7.org/CodeSystem/discharge-disposition",
        "code": "home-health",
        "display": "Home Health"
      }, {
        "system": "http://terminology.hl7.org/CodeSystem/v2-0112",
        "code": "06",
        "display": "Discharged/transferred to home under care of organized home health service"
      }]
    }
  }
}

Mapping failure example — modern NUBC code not yet in HL70112:

PV1|1|I|2W^201^A|E|||1234^SMITH^JOHN|||MED||||1||||V|10456^^^FIN||||||||||||||||||||||||||||81

81 (Discharged to court/law enforcement) was added by NUBC after HL70112 was frozen at v2.6 content. A conformant engine should accept the value as a user-defined extension, preserve it in the audit log, and either remap (often 05 Other institution) or pass through with a soft warning so downstream billing systems can decide.

FHIR mapping

The HL7 v2-to-FHIR Implementation Guide maps PV1-36 to Encounter.hospitalization.dischargeDisposition, which is a CodeableConcept bound to the NUBC patient-discharge code system. Because the FHIR ValueSet is the same NUBC code set, the mapping is largely identity: code 06 in v2 becomes code 06 in FHIR (or the named slug home-health in the HL7 Terminology discharge-disposition CodeSystem).

Implementers should emit the original two-digit code as a second coding element so the v2 outbound channel can restore the exact NUBC value.

Engine considerations

• Two-digit validation — PV1-36 is two characters in HL70112; engines should reject single-digit values (6 instead of 06) and pad-on-ingest if the source is known to drop leading zeros.
• Case insensitivity — HL70112 codes are numeric; case is not a concern, but leading/trailing whitespace must be stripped.
• CWE upgrade path — In v2.7+ profiles PV1-36 may be transmitted as CWE rather than IS, allowing OID metadata in CWE.14 (2.16.840.1.113883.18.34). Engines must handle both shapes.
• PV1-37 pairing — When PV1-36 is 02, 03, 04, 05, 61–66, or 70, PV1-37 Discharged to Location should be populated with the specific receiving facility. Engines should warn (not block) when the location is missing.
• NUBC drift — NUBC publishes new codes annually; engines must accept unknown two-digit codes as user-defined and route to curation rather than rejecting the discharge ADT outright.
• Mortality cohort handling — Codes 20, 40, 41, 42 all indicate the patient died; analytics pipelines should treat them as a class.

How Vorro handles HL70112

Vorro validates PV1-36 against the 23 HL70112 codes on ingest and additionally against the current NUBC published set for codes added after v2.6 freeze. Values that match HL70112 are forwarded untouched. Values that match the broader NUBC set are forwarded with a terminology.extended tag so downstream systems know the code is valid NUBC but not HL7-republished. Values that fail both checks — including malformed single-digit values, vendor extensions, and accidental display strings — are routed to the terminology curation queue, where they either resolve to one of the canonical codes (and a remap rule is created) or pass through with a soft warning.

On outbound, Vorro emits HL70112 as IS for v2.5 and earlier profiles and as CWE with CWE.14 populated for v2.7+ destinations. When mapping to FHIR Encounter.hospitalization.dischargeDisposition, Vorro emits both the FHIR named slug and the original two-digit v2 code as parallel coding entries so the value round-trips losslessly.

Related pages

• PV1 segment — Patient Visit
• HL70007 code table — Admission Type
• HL70004 code table — Patient Class

Sources

• Caristix — Table 0112 (HL7 v2.8.1) Discharge Disposition
• National Uniform Billing Committee (NUBC)
• HL7 v2 product brief