HL7 character limits… specifically patient name, can go over the 48 limit?

[Jason]

I’m looking at my HL7 2.3 field definition for PID5, patient name, it’s saying the limit is 48 with type Ext Person Name (XPN)

But I’m looking at the actual messages, and even sent some test ones, and it’s definitely receiving and passing along names that are way longer than 48 characters…

I’m sure this is expected but how/why is this happening? It looks like it’s chopping every sub-field (first name, middle name, last name) to 100 characters.

Topic

[Keith McLeod]

When you have your variant open, select options, then select control field length.  Once there you can check or uncheck “Do not truncate any field content”.  I generally set this so I can control field length with code instead of the variant.

[Jay Hammond]

Wait, so if I check “Do not truncate any field content,” Cloverleaf will ignore the field lengths set at the segment level?  So that for, say, PDF messages, I don’t have to remember to go back and set the OBX-5 field to unlimited?!  If that’s the case, I wish I’d seen this before; like, years ago, lol.

Are there any reasons that one would NOT want to check that box?

[Keith McLeod]

I stumbled on it a few years ago.  It has made things easier.  Always felt that the truncation of the field limits contained in a variant was a stealth act.  I see no reason not to check it.  The difficulty was to address all the things it fixed once you checked it.  An example was that for patient class a 3 character numeric was being sent out.  The variant truncated to 1 character so 101, 102, 1nd 103 all were being sent across as 1.  Once checked now they contained all 3 characters…. Did it break of get fixed with the change.  At least now I could address it properly.

[Jay Hammond]

Thank you, Keith.

[Robert Kersemakers]

Cool to read this. Didn’t know the option was there and wouldn’t have found it on my own.

I agree with Jay, why would you NOT want to check that box?
At least: if it concerns a normal HL7 variant. We also have a HL7 variant that is used to convert the message into a whole different format (SAP HCM) and then field lengths are definitely needed.

Zuyderland Medisch Centrum; Heerlen/Sittard; The Netherlands

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