Department
Mortuary
This is the one department where a hospital cannot recover from an error, and it is usually the last one any system reaches. The register is a book, the authorisation is a signature on a slip, and the medico-legal status is whatever the emergency room said on the phone.
CustodyAuthorisationMedico-legalRelease
A body in a hospital’s custody is a legal responsibility before it is an administrative one. Everything here follows from that sentence.
Impact and action
The register.
- Custody is recorded in a bound book at the door, so a question asked six months later is answered by handwriting.Custody runs as an access-gated procedure on the record, with every entry attributable and timestamped.Cadence
- Nobody outside the room can say what is in it right now.The register is a live view built from the same records the room keeps, readable only by the people the hospital permits.Falcon
The release.
- Release is authorised verbally by whoever is available, and the documentation follows later if at all.Release is an authorised step with a named approver, and the documentation is a form that locks the moment it is completed.CadenceGlyph
- A family is asked to produce papers the hospital already holds.Death certification, the release documents and the identity all sit on the same record, so the hospital asks once.Atlas
The medico-legal case.
- Whether a case is medico-legal is remembered rather than recorded, and a body is released that should have been held.Medico-legal status is an attribute of the patient record carried from the point of arrival, and it gates the release step.GateAtlas
- Police intimation and the statutory register are kept separately from everything else.The register and its evidence sit with the incident record, where an accreditation review and a legal request both find them.Vigil
The tools this room runs on.
Short, because the room is. Each row is what the tool does here, with the example the person on duty would recognise.
| Tool | What it does here | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Cadence | Runs custody and release as an authorised, access-gated procedure. | Release requires the named approver the hospital designated, on the record. |
| Glyph | Runs the release documentation, locked once completed. | A handover form signed off and unalterable afterwards. |
| Gate | Carries the medico-legal status from the patient record. | A flagged case cannot be released without the step the hospital requires. |
| Atlas | Holds the record everything attaches to, with consent and access history. | Who opened this record, and when, is answerable. |
| Vigil | Keeps the statutory registers and incidents as standing evidence. | The register an assessor asks for is already assembled. |
Interdepartmental