Data Contribution
Organizations connected to Health Gorilla both receive and contribute data, and all records—regardless of direction—are processed through the same quality and compliance pipeline. Contributing data ensures that other participants can access accurate, current information and helps your organization meet federal interoperability requirements.
Why Contribution Matters
Contributing data is required under most nationwide exchange frameworks and delivers tangible benefits. Participation in trusted exchange communities is reciprocal—your ability to retrieve records depends on your willingness to share.
By contributing encounter summaries, lab results, or immunizations, your organization:
- Enriches the collective patient record across networks
- Strengthens continuity of care for shared patients
- Demonstrates compliance with TEFCA, HIPAA, and CMS interoperability rules
Shareback Requirements
Different types of organizations have varying responsibilities for contributing data back to national networks. These obligations uphold reciprocity and ensure all participants benefit from a more complete patient record.
| Integration Type | Shareback Expectation |
|---|---|
| EHR vendors | Must support record contribution via FHIR or C-CDA |
| Payers | Optional, but encouraged for care coordination |
| Interoperability platforms | Must support read/write parity if receiving shared data |
| Individual providers | Depends on organization policy and technical capability |
Contribution Methods
Health Gorilla supports several approaches for submitting data, allowing you to align contribution with your existing systems. You can:
- Post FHIR resources directly to the Health Gorilla FHIR API, including
Patient,Encounter,DocumentReference,Observation,Immunization, andMedicationRequest - Upload structured documents such as C-CDAs, which Health Gorilla parses and converts into FHIR resources for downstream exchange
- Leverage the Lab Network so that diagnostic orders and results submitted as part of ordering workflows are automatically contributed as
ObservationandDocumentReferenceresources
Responder-Only Participation
Some organizations contribute data to the network without retrieving records. Health Gorilla supports this responder-only model through two implementation paths:
- Health Gorilla Data Repository: Contributed data is stored in the Health Gorilla FHIR core and made available to external queries through national networks.
- Federated Access: Data remains in your system, and Health Gorilla queries it in place when external requests are received.
Responder-only participants act as data responders under TEFCA and related frameworks. They do not initiate record retrievals but must maintain active participation agreements, technical endpoints, and data-sharing policies that comply with network trust and reciprocity requirements.
Health Gorilla enforces responder-only status at the platform level, ensuring only inbound queries are processed while outbound query capabilities remain disabled. This configuration preserves compliance with the principal organization’s permissions and provides a clear audit trail for all inbound exchanges.
Data Handling
When sharing data, Health Gorilla processes it through several quality and compliance steps to ensure consistency and trust:
- Validates resources against FHIR profiles and standard vocabularies (LOINC, SNOMED CT, RxNorm)
- Normalizes records into consistent structures for exchange
- Tags each resource with provenance metadata so recipients can identify the original source
- Routes records through Carequality, CommonWell, eHealth Exchange, and TEFCA QHINs according to framework rules
Best Practices
To maximize the value of contribution and avoid downstream errors, Health Gorilla recommends that you:
- Include local patient identifiers in
PatientandEncounterresources to support accurate matching - Use standard vocabularies whenever possible for conditions, labs, and medications
- Share complete and accurate records for every encounter, not partial subsets
- Audit contribution activity regularly to confirm that shared records are received and acknowledged by partner systems