HL7 Table HL70201: Telecommunication Use Code

HL70201 is an HL7-defined code table present since HL7 v2.2, and it carries the "use" of a telecommunication endpoint — is this the primary residence phone, the work phone, the beeper, the email address, or the vacation home line. It sits behind XTN.2 Telecommunication Use Code on every XTN-typed field: PID-13 Patient Phone, PID-14 Business Phone, NK1-5 Next of Kin Phone, STF-10 Staff Phone, and many more. The values are three-character codes drawn from the ID data type — nine total in v2.8.1.

Purpose

HL70201 records how a given phone number, pager, or email address should be used: which line to ring first, which is the after-hours fallback, which is the emergency line. It does not describe the equipment type (landline vs cell vs fax vs email) — that is the job of XTN.3 Telecommunication Equipment Type (HL70202). HL70201 answers the social/contextual question (whose phone, when to use it); HL70202 answers the technical question (what equipment is on the other end).

Because the table is HL7-defined, every conformant v2 receiver is expected to recognize the nine codes below without local extension. Sites that need richer use semantics typically combine HL70201 with HL70202 to differentiate, for example, "work cell" (WPN + CP) from "work landline" (WPN + PH).

Where it's used

• PID-13 Phone Number — Home, where multiple repetitions distinguish PRN (primary), VHN (vacation), NET (email), BPN (beeper).
• PID-14 Phone Number — Business, typically WPN with optional ASN (answering service) repetition.
• NK1-5, NK1-6, NK1-7 Next of Kin contact numbers.
• STF-10 Staff Phone Number — Office, EMR codes are common for on-call physicians.
• OBR-17 Order Callback Phone Number, GT1-7 Guarantor Phone Number, IN1-7 Insurance Phone Number, and many more.

Code list

Code system OID

• OID: 2.16.840.1.113883.18.109
• Canonical URI: http://terminology.hl7.org/CodeSystem/v2-0201

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 for XTN.2.

HL7-defined vs user-defined

HL70201 is HL7-defined. The table number falls inside the HL7-reserved range (HL70001–HL70999), and the code set is normative — receivers must accept all nine values without local extension, and senders must not invent additional codes inside this table. Sites that need extra granularity (for example, "school number" or "neighbor's number") typically use the XTN.9 Any Text comment field rather than extending HL70201.

Version differences

• v2.2 — Initial set: PRN, WPN, ORN, VHN, BPN, EMR, NET, ASN.
• v2.3 – v2.5 — Set unchanged.
• v2.6 — PRS (Personal) added to cover mobile numbers that are neither home nor work.
• v2.7 – v2.8.1 — Set frozen at nine codes; no further additions.
• v2.9 — HL70201 itself is unchanged; XTN.2 may be transmitted alongside the additional XTN.18 Preference Order field to give receivers an explicit ranking.

Common mistakes

• Sending the display word in XTN.2 — Home instead of PRN. XTN.2 is ID, and the code value is the three-character symbol.
• Confusing HL70201 (use) with HL70202 (equipment). PRN plus an iPhone is a primary-residence cell phone — PRN^CP in XTN.2^XTN.3. Putting CP in XTN.2 is wrong.
• Using NET for a website URL. NET is for email; URLs go in XTN.7.
• Defaulting unknown phones to PRN because the EHR demands a non-null value. Leaving XTN.2 empty is allowed and is better than mis-labeling a work cell as a primary residence number.
• Extending HL70201 locally with MOB (Mobile) or CELL. Mobile is described by HL70202 equipment type CP, not by an HL70201 use code. The right combination for a personal cell is PRS^CP.

Examples

A PID with primary residence phone and a work phone:

PID|1||10456^^^MRN^MR||DOE^JANE^A||19850412|F|||123 MAIN ST^^BOSTON^MA^02118||^PRN^PH^^^617^5551212~^WPN^PH^^^617^5559900|||S||10456

A patient with home, work cell, beeper, and email:

PID|1||10456^^^MRN^MR||DOE^JANE||19850412|F|||123 MAIN ST^^BOSTON^MA^02118||^PRN^PH^^^617^5551212~^WPN^CP^^^617^5552222~^BPN^BP^^^617^5553333~^NET^Internet^jane.doe@example.com

Next-of-kin emergency contact:

NK1|1|DOE^JOHN^A|SPO|||^EMR^PH^^^617^5559999

Same PRN value translated to a FHIR Patient.telecom snippet:

{
  "resourceType": "Patient",
  "id": "10456",
  "telecom": [{
    "system": "phone",
    "value": "+1-617-555-1212",
    "use": "home",
    "_use": {
      "extension": [{
        "url": "http://example.org/StructureDefinition/v2-telecom-use",
        "valueCode": "PRN"
      }]
    }
  }]
}

Mapping failure example — unknown vendor code:

PID|1||10456^^^MRN^MR||DOE^JANE||19850412|F|||123 MAIN ST||^MOBILE^CP^^^617^5552222

MOBILE is not in HL70201. A conformant engine should route the message to a curation queue, preserve the original MOBILE in the audit log, and either remap (the right answer is PRS use plus CP equipment) or pass through with a soft warning rather than silently dropping the value.

FHIR mapping

The HL7 v2-to-FHIR Implementation Guide publishes ConceptMap-table-hl70201-to-contact-point-use, which collapses the nine HL7 codes onto the five-value FHIR contact-point-use ValueSet:

ContactPoint.use is a code bound to http://hl7.org/fhir/ValueSet/contact-point-use. Because three v2 codes (PRN, ORN, VHN) collapse to FHIR home and BPN/PRS both collapse to mobile, the original v2 code should be preserved as an extension on ContactPoint if the receiver needs to round-trip back to HL7 v2.

Engine considerations

• Three-character validation — XTN.2 is up to three characters; engines should validate length and reject malformed values.
• Case sensitivity — HL70201 codes are case-sensitive uppercase; prn is not a valid code. Normalize on ingest.
• CWE upgrade path — In v2.7+ profiles XTN.2 remains ID, but profiles that elevate to CWE for telecom should populate CWE.14 with the OID (2.16.840.1.113883.18.109).
• Repetition order — Many EHRs treat the first XTN repetition as the preferred contact regardless of XTN.2. Engines should not silently re-order repetitions; if preference order matters, populate XTN.18 (v2.9+) explicitly.
• Round-trip preservation — When mapping to FHIR ContactPoint.use, store the original HL70201 code as an extension so the v2 outbound channel can restore PRN/ORN/VHN distinction.

How Vorro handles HL70201

Vorro validates XTN.2 against the nine HL70201 codes on every XTN field in every segment on ingest. Values that match are forwarded to all downstream channels untouched. Values that fail validation — including lowercase variants, vendor extensions like MOBILE or CELL, and accidental display strings — are routed to the terminology curation queue, where they either resolve to one of the nine canonical codes (and a remap rule is created) or pass through with a soft warning so downstream systems are not silently fed bad data.

On outbound, Vorro emits HL70201 as ID for every v2 profile and emits the OID in CWE.14 only on profiles that have explicitly upgraded XTN.2 to CWE. When mapping to FHIR ContactPoint, Vorro always preserves the original three-character code as an extension so the v2 outbound channel can restore the full HL70201 distinction.

Related pages

• XTN data type — Extended Telecommunication Number
• PID segment — Patient Identification
• HL70202 code table — Telecommunication Equipment Type

Sources

• HL7 Terminology — CodeSystem v2-0201 Telecommunication Use Code
• HL7 v2-to-FHIR IG — ConceptMap HL70201 to contact-point-use
• HL7 v2 product brief