What Is HL7 v2 PV2-8? Expected Discharge Date/Time, Explained for Testers
Length-of-stay dashboards, discharge planning tools, and bed-turnover forecasts all lean on one small timestamp buried in PV2 - and it's rarely tested with realistic values.
PV2-8 is the standard HL7 timestamp field capturing when a patient is projected to be discharged, set at or near admission and often revised as the stay progresses. It follows the same YYYYMMDDHHMMSS convention as other HL7 v2 timestamps. Test suites that exercise discharge planning, bed forecasting, or utilization review workflows depend on this field being populated with a plausible date relative to the expected admit date in PV2-7 - a discharge date before the admit date is an easy but common test-data mistake.
What this field contains
Example
PV2-8 holds 20260729120000, a three-day expected stay following the 20260726073000 admit time in PV2-7.
Where this trips people up
It's common to see test generators populate Expected Discharge Date/Time with a fixed offset (say, always "next Tuesday") regardless of the admit reason or accommodation type, which produces a data set where a same-day observation visit and a multi-week rehabilitation stay end up with identical projected lengths of stay. If your test suite validates length-of-stay logic at all, vary the offset by scenario rather than defaulting to one interval everywhere.