Death

The Death domain contains the clinical event for how and when a Person dies. A person must have exactly one record if the source system contains evidence about the Death. Existence in this table, even with no additional information, marks a patient as dead.

Field	Required	Type	FK Table	Description
person_id	Yes	bigint	PERSON	A foreign key identifier to the deceased person. The demographic details of that person are stored in the person table.
death_date	No	date		The UTC date of death (e.g. possibly from the NHS Spine).
death_datetime	No	datetime		The UTC date and time the person was deceased or was marked as discharged deceased.
death_type_concept_id	No	bigint	CONCEPT	Used to record how the EHR learnt about the death (e.g. NHS spine, died in hospital, etc).
cause_concept_id	No	bigint	CONCEPT	Cause of death.
cause_source_value	No	varchar(50)		Cause of death as stored in the source EHR.
cause_source_concept_id	No	bigint	CONCEPT	Cause of death concept stored in the source EHR (if present).

Conventions

• Living patients should not contain any information in the DEATH table. Dead patients must have a record in the DEATH table.
• For any given patient, as many of death_date and death_datetime as are known should be submitted. Where the time is not known, the convention is to set time to midnight (00:00:00). If the date of death is not known at all, both columns can be NULL (i.e. we know they are dead, but we don’t know when they died).