PR1-5 in HL7 v2: A Field Guide to Procedure Date/Time
PR1-5 is supposed to capture the actual performed timestamp, not the scheduled slot. Systems that populate it from the OR schedule instead of the completed case record will happily report procedures that, according to the message, happened before the patient was even admitted.
PR1-5 is the fifth field of the HL7 v2 PR1 segment — the Procedure Date/Time, a timestamp recording when the procedure was actually performed, formatted as a standard HL7 date-time value.
What this field contains
Example
PR1-5 carries 20260726103000 — July 26, 2026 at 10:30:00, the moment the procedure was actually performed. Synthetic record — not a real patient.
Where this trips people up
A recurring bug is an interface that defaults PR1-5 to the scheduled procedure time from an OR booking system rather than waiting for the actual completed-case timestamp from documentation. In a rush case or an add-on procedure squeezed into an existing block, the scheduled time and the actual performed time can differ by hours, and a receiving system that orders procedures chronologically using PR1-5 will misplace the event relative to other clinical documentation, like anesthesia records or post-op notes. Test with at least one case where the procedure ran significantly later than scheduled, and verify the message reflects reality rather than the plan.