facility admission date
fac_admn_dtDefinition
The date on which a patient was formally admitted to a healthcare facility such as a hospital or skilled nursing facility. Stored in EHR and claims systems as a critical encounter attribute used to calculate length of stay, apply DRG grouping logic, trigger utilization management rules, and support inpatient claims adjudication and quality reporting.
Standard Abbreviation
fac_admn_dt
Category
clinical
Database Usage
-- Example column naming
CREATE TABLE claims (
clm_id VARCHAR(50),
fac_admn_dt DATE, -- facility admission date (date only, no time)
...
);
-- Example in SELECT
SELECT
clm_id,
fac_admn_dt as facility_admission_date
FROM claims;Example database column name
ISO-11179 snake_case standard
-- Recommended column name
fac_admn_dt
-- Example DDL
CREATE TABLE healthcare_data (
record_id VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
fac_admn_dt DATE, -- facility admission date (date only, no time)
created_dt TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT NOW()
);Column names follow the ISO-11179 naming convention: lowercase, underscore-separated, using the standard abbreviation as a prefix where applicable.
Why This Term Matters
Clinical terms are the building blocks of risk adjustment, quality measurement, and value-based care analytics. A data engineer who understands this terminology can design schemas that correctly capture patient conditions, procedures, and encounters — enabling accurate HCC scoring, HEDIS measure attribution, and CMS reporting. Misclassifying clinical fields in a data warehouse cascades into incorrect RAF scores and failed regulatory submissions.
Common uses in healthcare data
- Risk stratification and population health analytics
- CMS-HCC risk adjustment and RAF score calculation
- Quality measure attribution and HEDIS reporting
- Clinical data warehouse schema design
- Value-based care contract performance tracking
- Epic MyChart and Cerner PowerChart clinical data extraction for analytics pipelines
- Snowflake VARIANT column mapping for semi-structured HL7 FHIR clinical payloads
- Databricks Delta Lake pipeline orchestration for longitudinal patient cohort analysis
Related Healthcare Standards
HL7 FHIR R4
Defines clinical resource models (Patient, Condition, Observation, Encounter) that map directly to clinical data warehouse schemas and interoperability pipelines.
ICD-10-CM / ICD-10-PCS
The diagnosis and procedure coding systems mandated for all clinical documentation and claims in the US healthcare system.
HEDIS (NCQA)
Specifies clinical quality measure definitions that determine how clinical data is collected, attributed, and reported for Stars and value-based care contracts.
Data Quality Considerations
- ICD-10-CM codes are frequently entered with invalid trailing characters or missing decimal points — validate against the current CMS ICD code reference table before loading into your clinical data warehouse.
- Clinical date fields (admit date, discharge date, procedure date) often arrive with timezone offsets stripped — standardize to UTC at ingestion and store as TIMESTAMP_NTZ in Snowflake or TIMESTAMP in Databricks.
- Null vs. unknown must be distinguished in clinical data: a missing diagnosis code may mean 'not documented' rather than 'not applicable' — use explicit sentinel values and document the distinction in your data dictionary.
Related Content
Related Definitions
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