HL7 v2 PV1-4 (Admission Type): Format, Values, and Testing Notes
PV1-4 gets treated as a minor field until someone tries to build an accurate emergency-vs-elective admission report and discovers half the source feeds never populate it consistently.
PV1-4 is the fourth field of the PV1 segment — a coded value describing the circumstances of the admission, such as emergency, elective, or newborn.
Valid code values
Example
The 4th field (U) marks this as an urgent admission. Synthetic patient — not a real person.
Where this trips people up
Because PV1-4 overlaps in meaning with PV1-2 (Patient Class) and PV1-14 (Admit Source), some source systems populate it inconsistently or leave it blank, defaulting everything to Routine. That silently flattens an integration's ability to distinguish a true emergency admission from a scheduled elective one — a gap that usually only gets noticed when finance or quality reporting asks for admission-type breakdowns and the numbers don't add up.