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Fairly new to HL7 messaging, a quickie I'm sure for anyone that knows in depth this standard. Basically one of our clients wants to use PID2 as the patient identifier, we have always used PID3, my question is can we create/send a message without any data in the PID3 field and only use the PID2 field for the identifier?

Thanks

user3005409
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The HL7 PID Segment has originally three fields for Patient identifiers, PID.2 - Patient ID (External ID), PID.3 - Patient Identifier List (Internal ID), PID.4 - Alternate Patient ID.

Since Version 2.3.1 onwards PID.2 and PID.4 are deprecated and it is recommended to use only PID.3 for all purposes. Nevertheless you will still find older systems using the PID.2 or PID.4 and you should come to an agreement with your communication partner.

If you can create a message without PID.3 depends of the flexibility of the program or communication system you use for creating the message.

sqlab
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