A staff member from the Department of Public Health, identified in the recording as the trainer, demonstrated how funeral directors should start a new death record in the CT Vitals system for a home death and how to request medical certification from a primary care provider.

The trainer said the process begins by logging into the CT Vitals system, selecting the funeral home's office, choosing Death → Start/Edit New Case, and entering the decedent's first and last name, date of death and (where available) date of birth to populate age. "We have the normal search button, but you also have 2 new features called Soundex and Swap Names," the trainer said, describing tools intended to locate similarly sounding names and to interchange first and last names to help avoid duplicate records.

The trainer walked through entering the resident address so it can populate the place-of-death page and showed the pronouncement page where users can enter a time of death obtained from an EMT or the medical examiner. After selecting "Decedent's home" as the place of death, the trainer demonstrated requesting medical certification by selecting a certifier (provider) and the provider's office. The trainer advised entering at least three letters of the provider's last name when using the provider search and using the percent sign (%) as a wildcard when searching facility names to display facilities linked to a provider.

Using an example in the recording, the trainer selected "PCP Northeast Medical Group" as the provider office and highlighted that the auto-generated message to the certifier includes the case number, decedent name and date of death. The trainer also instructed funeral home users to add contact information (funeral director name and telephone number) so the certifier can follow up, and to place any additional pronouncement details in the Comments → New Comment → General Comments field for the certifier to see. In the example shown, the status bar updated to read that "medical certification has been requested" and later showed a notification when the case was certified; the trainer referenced a completed example for case number 16603 routed to a physician listed as "Dr. L M" at PCP Northeast Medical Group.

The recording emphasized these practical points: enter birth date when available to help identify the correct decedent; use Soundex and Swap Names to reduce duplicate records; populate the resident address so the place-of-death fields auto-fill; include contact details so certifiers can ask questions; and use the Comments field to pass pronouncement details such as EMT information.

The training concluded with the trainer noting that once the certifier completes medical certification the funeral home will receive a message and the status will update to "certified," allowing the funeral home to proceed with next steps in the death-record process.