Glossary

Quick definitions for the terms used throughout these docs.

Course of care. One birth as the registry models it: a single mother, the labor & delivery encounter, one or more children, and any transfers of care. It’s the unit you submit and the unit the API accepts or rejects.

Practice. Your tenant. Every API key is scoped to one practice, and all data you push or read is isolated to it.

BFDR. Birth and Fetal Death Reporting — the HL7 FHIR Implementation Guide whose profiles shape the Bundle you submit (the mother and child Patient profiles, the newborn Observations, and so on).

FHIR R4 Bundle. The submission payload: a FHIR Bundle (type: document) carrying the resources for a course of care. A Bundle can hold one course of care or, in batch mode, many — a Bundle whose entries are themselves Bundles.

Canonical spine. The small, input-agnostic data model every course of care maps into — Submission, Mother, Encounter, Child, Transfer of care — whether it arrived by FHIR push, CSV import, or the web form. Downstream filing and benchmarking read from the spine. See the data dictionary.

Transfer of care. A move of the mother or newborn to another care setting (antepartum, intrapartum, postpartum, or neonatal) — the community-birth differentiator. Zero or more per course of care.

Ingestion. One submitted Bundle and its processing. You get an ingestion id back immediately and poll it for status; it ends completed or failed.

OperationOutcome. The FHIR resource the API returns for every error and for each rejected record — so you parse one error shape everywhere.

Partial-batch success. In a batch, each course of care is validated independently: the good records land (accepted) and the bad ones are reported (rejected) without failing the whole submission.

Suspected duplicate. A submitted course of care that matches one already on file (same mother and newborn date/time). It is accepted and stored, then flagged for review — never auto-merged. See Duplicate handling.

Chart number. Your own record id for a course of care, sent as Bundle.identifier.value and stored as external_record_id. Unique within your practice.

Scope. A permission carried by an API key — ingest:write to submit, ingest:read to poll status.

Safe Harbor. The HIPAA de-identification method behind the registry’s reduced fields — e.g. a mother’s residence is stored as the first three ZIP digits (residence_zip3), not a full address.