HL7 v2 PV1-36 Field Guide: Discharge Disposition Codes and Common Mistakes
PV1-36 is only meaningful at the moment a patient actually leaves — but it is easy to build an interface that reads it on every message type and gets confused when it is empty everywhere except the one discharge event where it finally matters.
PV1-36 is the thirty-sixth field of the PV1 segment — a coded value describing where and how the patient left care, such as discharged home, transferred to another facility, or expired.
Common code values
Example
The 36th field (01) shows the patient was discharged to home. Synthetic patient — not a real person.
Where this trips people up
PV1-36 is empty on every message before discharge and only gets populated on the actual discharge event, typically an A03. Case management dashboards that poll for discharge disposition on any incoming PV1 segment, rather than specifically on the discharge event type, end up displaying stale or blank disposition values for active patients and then miss the real update entirely if their polling logic isn't keyed to the right trigger event.