Electronic Verification of Vital Events (EVVE)


model
service type	Public Health
country	United States
states	AK, AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, HI, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT, NC, ND, NE, NH, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA, WI, WV, WY, DC, VI, PR
government type	state
license	unknown
website	https://www.naphsis.org/evve

Note: We have profiled this collaborative in depth in our Anatomy of a Collaborative series: NAPHSIS.

Description

EVVE is a product of the National Association of Public Health Statistics and Information Systems, which was formed in 1933, Fifty states, New York City, Washington D.C., and two territories participate (Guam and American Samoa lack electronic birth and death registration). Built atop State and Territorial Exchange of Vital Events (STEVE), EVVE is funded by user fees. It is a query-based tool, launched in 2011, that allows organizations to verify or certify a known vital event by matching identity against U.S. birth certificate databases.

They say:

The EVVE system verifies identity quickly and powerfully by matching against United States birth certificate databases. EVVE is the sole source for this capability. No other private or federal database contains this data. In cases where a birth certificate is in hand, EVVE allows for immediate confirmation of the document’s legitimacy.

EVVE has two components. The first is a system that’s only for government employees to use to verify that a paper birth certificate is legitimate. The second is their “Fact of Death” system, which is open to private sector customers. That system can be provided with a list of people, and it will return the subset of the members of that list who are known to be deceased. It does this by sending a real-time query to every participating state and jurisdiction, ensuring thst most up-to-date information. Not all jurisdictions are willing to sell this data to all customers, so some users will get a response from a subset of all jurisdictions in the U.S. EVVE charges per query.

Each organization brought on is allowed or denied access directly by jurisdictions. So, the jurisdiction always has control over who is allowed to query their data. EVVE Fact-of-Death (FOD) is another query-based tool within EVVE. The jurisdictions opt in to participate based on categories of use, and a panel of jurisdiction representatives review all applications from organizations to use EVVE FOD. The review process ensures the organizations are assigned the appropriate category of use, and fall within the jurisdictions’ parameters for access.