Registrations

At the heart of Vitalware is the event data. Vitalware provides support for the capture, search and maintenance of all life events including:

• Births
• Deaths
• Marriages
• Civil partnerships (same sex marriages)
• Divorces
• ITOP (induced termination of pregnancy)
• Foetal deaths

Late registration of events is also supported.

A major feature of Vitalware is the ease with which the standard registration modules can be adapted to meet local legislative requirements and policies. Each Registry can support its own unique registration tables while still making use of the other processing and management features of Vitalware.

Other registers can also be supported by Vitalware, such as Registers of Wills.

Tip: See How to register events.

Each of the event modules supports a range of amendment processes relevant to that event type. For example, the births module supports amendment processes such as Adoption, Gender Change, Late Registration, Change of Name, Addition of Father’s Details, Addition of Parent’s Marriage Details, Correction of Clerical Error and Legal Correction.

The amendment process can only be performed by authorised personnel. It first copies the record to be amended and marks the original with a status of Pending. It then allows the user to make the appropriate change and finally apply the amendment.

On application of the amendment, the new version of the event record replaces the old and the status is changed to Current. The old version is retained and is linked to the new version as a permanent audit history of the registration.

Note that some amendments which are subject to privacy constraints (e.g. adoptions and gender changes) are performed by re-registration of the event, with references between pre- and post-adoptive records being automatically established but remaining highly privileged information. While Registry staff can retrieve either registration record, only highly privileged users can determine the pre-adoptive record from the post-adoptive record and vice versa.

Tip: See Maintenance records and how to amend registration records.

Vitalware supports the notion of multiple corroborating input sources to verify that an event has occurred. For example, a birth notification received from a hospital must, in all significant ways, match the registration form submitted by the parents before the birth event will be registered. Similarly, a death record may require both the medical officer’s death record (or coroner’s report) and the funeral director’s notice of disposal before it is recognised and registered. In this way, Vitalware ensures that only valid events are registered.

Vitalware incorporates an automated matching process which uses a suite of heuristics to determine matching registrations and notifications. Note that the different input sources of data can arrive and be entered at any time.

The automated matching process determines:

• Accurately matched pairs.
  These pairs (birth registration form from parents and hospital notification of birth) are modified to cross-reference each other and the registration is “formalised” allowing products such as birth certificates to be generated from them.
• Possibly matched pairs.
  The pairs are identified and made available to a suitably authorised staff member for acceptance or rejection of the possible match.
• Unmatched registrations.
  Registrations older than a given period (generally one week) for which no notification can be identified are made available to a suitably authorised staff member for follow-up. Follow-up may include selection of a notification with which it should be matched, contact with the appropriate hospital / birthing centre for confirmation of the birth or further investigation of the registration form.
• Unmatched notifications.
  Notifications older than a given period (generally one month) for which no registration has yet been received are made available to a suitably authorised staff member for follow-up. Follow-up may include selection of a registration with which it should be matched, automatic generation of a reminder notice to be sent to the parents or contact with the appropriate hospital / birthing centre for confirmation of the birth. This ensures that all events are registered.

Tip: See How to work with Match Lists.

Closely coupled to the event based data modules is the Life Event history of an individual. This facility uses a suite of heuristics to automatically match recorded events and thus to derive a comprehensive life history for individuals. This Life Event record in no way impacts the registration modules. It simply augments them by referencing individual event records.

The event matching processes automatically produce exception reports for unmatched or “possibly matched” events allowing authorised personnel to complete or confirm the system’s proposed action.

While the Event Matching facility of Vitalware automates this cross-referencing process, this can be overridden by an authorised user, simply by dragging and dropping one record on to another.

Vitalware supports double keying data entry to ensure that all registrations are recorded accurately. This option is provided for entire registrations or critical fields of registrations (all registration modules can be configured to use the double key function).

Tip: See Double keying data entry for details.