HL7 v2 PV1-17 (Admitting Doctor): Format, Values, and Testing Notes
PV1-17 and PV1-7 both hold physician composites and sit close together in the segment, and it is a surprisingly common integration bug to map one into the field meant for the other — a mistake that looks fine in testing and then confuses clinicians reviewing the wrong "physician of record" on a chart.
PV1-17 is the seventeenth field of the PV1 segment — a composite (XCN data type) identifying the physician who admitted the patient, which may or may not be the same person as the attending doctor in PV1-7.
What this field contains
Example
The 17th field (998877^CHEN^LISA^K^^MD) names Dr. Lisa K. Chen as the admitting physician, distinct from the attending physician in field 7. Synthetic patient — not a real person.
Where this trips people up
Because the admitting and attending doctor are the same person for a large share of visits, it is easy for a mapping mistake between PV1-7 and PV1-17 to go unnoticed through months of testing and production use. It surfaces the first time a patient is admitted by an ED physician but has a different physician assigned as attending — and downstream systems start displaying or billing under the wrong name.