HL7 v2 Reference

HL7 v2 PD1-11 Field Guide: Publicity Code Values and Common Mistakes

Jul 28, 2026 · 4 min read

PD1-11 is the field standing between a patient's name and the hospital's public directory — get it wrong in either direction and you either expose someone who asked to be left out, or hide someone whose visitors can't find them at the front desk.

Quick answer

PD1-11 is the Publicity Code field, a coded entry indicating whether — and how — a patient's information may be included in facility directories, general publicity, or visitor lookups. It's typically drawn from a locally maintained table rather than a single universal set of values, so its meaning can vary by implementation.

What this field contains

Component 1

Code — the short code value, e.g. 01

Component 2

Text — a human-readable label for the code, e.g. ONE PER PATIENT

Component 3

Coding system — identifies which locally defined table the code comes from

Common failure

Table drift — since the code set is locally defined, a mismatch between sending and receiving system tables can silently misinterpret the flag

Example

Synthetic example Generated by Synthibase

PD1|||SYNTHIB COMMUNITY CLINIC^^12345|4521^WELLS^SARAH^^^DR|||||||01^ONE PER PATIENT^SYNTHIBLOCAL|Y|20260101|||A|20260115

PD1-11 (01^ONE PER PATIENT^SYNTHIBLOCAL) carries a locally coded publicity preference, drawn from a fictional table for this example.

Where this trips people up

Because PD1-11 draws from a locally defined table rather than a fixed HL7 code set, test suites that hardcode a single value or copy a value from one system's table into another system's test messages can end up validating a mapping that doesn't actually exist in production. The safer approach is to test with the receiving system's real table values and to include the no-publicity case explicitly, since that's the one most likely to have real consequences if it's dropped.

→

Testing HL7 v2 PD1: The Fields Your System Actually Needs to Handle

→

How to Build a Synthetic Patient Registry for Healthcare Testing

→

HL7 ADT Messages: A01 through A08 Explained

Test directory logic against real code tables

Synthibase can generate publicity codes aligned to your receiving system's actual local table, so directory opt-out and opt-in scenarios get validated against the mapping you'll run in production.

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This page is written independently by Synthibase for testing and informational purposes. It is not an official publication of HL7 International or X12/Washington Publishing Company, and is not a substitute for reviewing the official standard or your trading partner's companion guide. See our Terms of Service for full legal terms.