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April 2018
Hospitals must report fetal deaths of 20 weeks or more
gestation to the Office of Vital Records. Parents who experience these fetal
deaths may request a Certificate of Birth Resulting in Stillbirth—a legal
document that is available only from the Office of Vital Records. The
certificates print on security paper that meets the same fraud prevention
standards as other vital records certificates. Parents who have experienced a
fetal death (stillbirth) in Minnesota may be eligible for a refundable credit of
$2,000 from the Minnesota Department of Revenue. To claim the tax credit, the
parents must have a Certificate of Birth Resulting in Stillbirth.
Hospitals please note—parents who request this certificate
must use the current (12/2017)
application for a Certificate of Birth Resulting in Stillbirth. When the
Office of Vital Records receives a request made on an out-of-date form, it must
reject the request because required language about the tax credit is missing on
old forms. Please help parents get the correct application so that OVR can
fulfill their request without delay. Some of the parents who have had their
requests rejected have told OVR that they got the old form from well-meaning
staff at the hospital.
Help parents going through this difficult experience find
success. Check to make sure that the forms you give to parents are current. See
the Minnesota Department of Revenue Credit
for Parents of Stillborn Children page for information about the tax credit.
The Office of Vital Records Birth
Resulting in Stillbirth page has detailed information about requesting a
Certificate of Birth Resulting in Stillbirth.
Did you read ‘Forgot your MR&C password?’ or ‘MDH Technology Moving to the Cloud’ in the March and
February issues of Vital Records News? If you have not read these articles, or
the information below, and you use MR&C, take a moment to prepare for
password management changes coming in mid-May.
OVR is using Keycloak, a new tool to manage MR&C
passwords.
MR&C and Keycloak work seamlessly together. When MR&C
starts to use Keycloak, all users must create new passwords before logging
into MR&C. If you know your user name, this will be very easy:
- Click on the “Forgot password” link on the MR&C
login page.
- Enter your user name and ‘Submit’.
- Within moments, find an email with a link to
Keycloak in your inbox – click on the link.
- Enter your new password, confirm it and ‘Submit’.
- Go back to MR&C and log in as usual.
Once you have confirmed your user account with a new
password, Keycloak is invisible – until you need to change your password, you
forget it, or it expires. No secret questions. No waiting through a weekend or
holiday until OVR staff are back in the office to unlock or reset your password.
As long as you know your user name, you will be able to change your password
for any reason at any time.
Keycloak is scheduled to “go live” mid-May. Watch for more
information.
Possible law change to address long-standing inequity
Minnesota legislation that
would grant American Indian tribes the same access to vital records information
as currently granted to local public health and local units of government, is
working its way through the legislative process.
The bill, HF 3366
(Zerwas) and SF 3019
(Nelson), has been heard in committees and is awaiting action by the full House
and Senate bodies. The bill addresses a provision in Minnesota Statutes, section 144.225 that prohibits tribal health professionals and tribal child support
workers from accessing critical information about births in their communities and
using that information to provide effective services to at-risk mothers and
babies and support to families. The bill also allows tribal governments
tangible interest to get legal birth certificates issued from public records as
other local, state, and federal government programs do.
The legislature has
until May 21, 2018, to approve the bill and send it to the Governor for his
signature.
Cremation approval subject to fees
Effective
for 2018, the Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office charges a $50 fee for
cremation approvals. This move follows other large offices such as Midwest Medical
Examiner’s Office and the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office that
implemented fees in prior years. Minnesota Statutes, section 390.15 allows coroners and medical
examiners to charge fees to approve cremations and fees for reports, other
administrative functions, and to recover reasonable expenses, such as bags to
transport decedents.
Please direct all questions about medical examiner and
coroner fees to the medical examiner or coroner’s office in the jurisdiction
where the death occurred.
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