Understanding HL7 v2 PV1-14: Admit Source in Practice
PV1-14 quietly answers a question quality and capacity-planning teams care about a lot: where did this patient actually come from before they landed in this bed? Get the code wrong and transfer-in volume disappears from reporting entirely.
PV1-14 is the fourteenth field of the PV1 segment — a coded value indicating where the patient was admitted from, such as physician referral, transfer from another facility, or the emergency room.
Valid code values
Example
The 14th field (7) marks this admission as originating from the emergency room. Synthetic patient — not a real person.
Where this trips people up
Registration workflows built primarily around direct admissions and ED-to-inpatient conversions sometimes never surface a UI option for the transfer-in codes (4, 5, 6), so registrars default every admission to physician referral regardless of the actual source. The HL7 message ends up technically valid but factually wrong, and transfer volume — a number hospital operations teams actively track — undercounts silently until someone cross-checks it against another system.