HL7 Table HL70131: Contact Role

HL70131 classifies the role a contact person plays with respect to a patient or an account — billing contact, general contact person, emergency contact, or the person who prepared a referral. It is distinct from HL70063 (Relationship), which describes kinship (mother, spouse, guardian). A patient's mother might be the emergency contact; HL70063 says "MTH" and HL70131 says "EP". The code set is small and stable across all v2 versions through v2.8.1.

Purpose

HL70131 answers the question "in what capacity does this person interact with the patient or account?" rather than "how are they related?" The two axes are deliberately separated so the same individual can play multiple roles (a spouse who is both the emergency contact and the billing contact) and so non-kin contacts (a referral coordinator, a billing department) can be carried without forcing a kinship code.

Because the table is HL7-defined, conformant receivers accept the four codes below without local extension. Sites that need to record additional contact roles (HR contact, school nurse, social worker) typically carry those distinctions on a separate CWE field rather than overloading HL70131.

Where it's used

NK1-7 Contact Role — the canonical home of HL70131, populated when an ADT or registration message carries next-of-kin or other contact data.
CTI-3 Contact Role — the Clinical Trial Identification segment uses HL70131 to identify roles of trial contacts.
PRT-4 Participation in some profiles when the participant is a non-clinical contact.

Code list

Code	Display	Comment/Description
BP	Billing contact person	Person responsible for billing inquiries and statements on the account; often distinct from the guarantor.
CP	Contact person	General-purpose contact person — the default when no more specific role applies.
EP	Emergency contact person	Person to notify in an emergency; the most frequently populated value on NK1-7.
PR	Person preparing referral	Person (often a referral coordinator or nurse) who prepared a referral request; used on CTI and REF-family messages.

Code system OID

OID: 2.16.840.1.113883.18.52
Canonical URI: http://terminology.hl7.org/CodeSystem/v2-0131

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

HL7-defined vs user-defined

HL70131 is HL7-defined. The table number falls inside the HL7-reserved range (HL70001–HL70999), and the four codes above are normative. Sites occasionally encounter receivers that have locally extended HL70131 with codes like LR (legally responsible) or SCH (school contact); those extensions are non-conformant and should be carried on a different field rather than added to HL70131. The codes here are stable and have not been deprecated.

Version differences

v2.3.1 — HL70131 introduced with the four codes BP, CP, EP, PR.
v2.4 – v2.6 — No changes; the set stayed at four codes.
v2.7 — NK1-7 transitioned from CE to CWE, allowing OID metadata to accompany the HL70131 code.
v2.8 – v2.8.1 — Set frozen at four codes; no further additions.

The stability of HL70131 across fifteen-plus years reflects its narrow scope: it carries contact role, nothing more.

Common mistakes

Conflating HL70131 with HL70063. NK1-3 carries kinship (HL70063); NK1-7 carries role (HL70131). Both can be populated on the same NK1.
Sending EMERGENCY or Billing instead of the two-character code. NK1-7 is CWE; the code value is the short symbol.
Defaulting every NK1 to CP when the source actually knows the contact is an emergency contact. EHRs that drive NK1 generation from a single "contacts" table often miss the role distinction.
Extending HL70131 with vendor codes (HR, SCH, ATTY). Conformant receivers will reject or quarantine the message; carry the extra role on a separate field instead.
Treating PR (Person preparing referral) as a clinical participation code. PR identifies the preparer, not the referring provider — that is PRD-2 or ROL-3.

Examples

A minimal NK1 with an emergency contact:

NK1|1|DOE^JOHN^A|SPO^Spouse^HL70063|123 MAIN ST^^BOSTON^MA^02118|(617)555-1212||EP^Emergency contact person^HL70131

A billing contact distinct from the patient:

NK1|2|SMITH^MARY|MTH^Mother^HL70063|456 OAK ST^^BOSTON^MA^02118|(617)555-9090||BP^Billing contact person^HL70131

A CTI segment carrying a referral preparer:

CTI|TRIAL-42||PR^Person preparing referral^HL70131

Translated to a FHIR RelatedPerson snippet:

{
  "resourceType": "RelatedPerson",
  "patient": { "reference": "Patient/10456" },
  "relationship": [
    {
      "coding": [{
        "system": "http://terminology.hl7.org/CodeSystem/v2-0131",
        "code": "EP",
        "display": "Emergency contact person"
      }]
    },
    {
      "coding": [{
        "system": "http://terminology.hl7.org/CodeSystem/v3-RoleCode",
        "code": "SPS",
        "display": "spouse"
      }]
    }
  ]
}

The kinship and role axes ride side by side in relationship as two separate CodeableConcept entries.

FHIR mapping

The HL7 v2-to-FHIR IG maps NK1-7 onto RelatedPerson.relationship (or Patient.contact.relationship when the contact is carried inline on Patient). The target ValueSet is http://hl7.org/fhir/ValueSet/patient-contactrelationship, which itself draws from v3 RoleCode and v2-0131. When the source carries both NK1-3 (kinship) and NK1-7 (role), FHIR receivers should emit two entries in the relationship array rather than collapsing them.

HL7 v2 (HL70131)	FHIR patient-contactrelationship
BP	BP (Billing contact person)
CP	C (Emergency contact / general — context-dependent)
EP	C (Emergency contact person)
PR	(no direct concept — preserved as v2-0131 Coding)

PR has no direct FHIR contact-relationship target and should be carried through as a Coding with system = v2-0131 so downstream consumers can interpret it.

Engine considerations

Two-letter validation — HL70131 codes are two uppercase letters; engines should reject lowercase or three-letter payloads on ingest.
Dual-axis preservation — NK1-3 (HL70063) and NK1-7 (HL70131) carry independent concepts. Engines that flatten contacts to a single FHIR relationship value lose information; emit both as separate Coding entries.
CWE upgrade path — In v2.7+ profiles NK1-7 is CWE with CWE.3 = HL70131 and CWE.14 = the OID. Engines must handle both pre- and post-v2.7 shapes.
PR routing — PR (Person preparing referral) is more common on REF/CTI messages than on ADT NK1 segments. Engines processing referral inbound flows should preserve PR on the originating message rather than dropping it during demographic synchronization.

How Vorro handles HL70131

Vorro validates NK1-7 and CTI-3 against the four HL70131 codes on ingest. Values that match are forwarded to all downstream channels untouched. Values that fail validation — including locally extended HR, SCH, or display strings — are routed to the terminology curation queue, where they either resolve to one of the four canonical codes (and a remap rule is created) or pass through with a soft warning that flags the field as non-conformant.

On outbound, Vorro emits HL70131 as CE for v2.5 and earlier profiles and as CWE with CWE.14 populated for v2.7+ destinations that advertise OID-bound coded values. When converting to FHIR RelatedPerson, both the HL70131 role and the HL70063 kinship are preserved as separate relationship entries so the round-trip back to v2 reconstructs both fields cleanly.

Sources

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