Welcome to the community, @Doc_Ed!
There may be some data points, especially Measurements (Labs) and Conditions (cause of death, cancer diagnosis) that will be recorded after a Person dies. Lab cultures, autopsy reports, tumor identification, etc. If you end an Observation Period at the death datetime, then this data may be missed. At Colorado, we end the Observation Period with the last record for a Person. Others may do it differently. Many EHR data holders limit records to deathdate +60 days. Any records after that are thought to be an error. However, as you point out:
We as a community need to provide more guidance around this topic. You should join our EHR WG calls held every other Friday at 8am Mountain time, 3pm UK time (GMT +1). The next call is August 23rd. This would make for a good topic of discussion.
Regarding your diagram. An “inpatient visit” is the time a Person is admitted to the hospital until the Person is discharged. If the Person goes from ICU to general medical floor to discharge, all the different locations inside the hospital are part of one inpatient visit. If you want to differentiate the time a Person is in the ICU from the time they are on the general medical unit, please use the Visit Detail table. One record in the Visit Detail table will be for the ICU (this is a Care Site) and another record would be created for the general medical floor/unit/area of care (also a Care Site).
Does this answer your question? And did I create more questions?