FAQs
When you begin processing Clinical Alerts, you may encounter common questions about delivery timing, filtering, enrollment behavior, or retrieval patterns. The following FAQs address typical scenarios that arise when implementing and monitoring Clinical Alerts.
1. How are Clinical Alerts triggered?
Clinical Alerts are triggered when Health Gorilla detects new document activity for an enrolled patient, typically after a national network participant performs an ITI-55 (Patient Discovery) or ITI-38 (Document Query) transaction.
2. What types of events generate Clinical Alerts?
You receive a Clinical Alert when a new clinical document—such as a CCD, encounter summary, or discharge note—is retrieved and successfully parsed into a FHIR Encounter resource.
3. How are Clinical Alerts delivered?
You can choose one of the following delivery formats:
- FHIR webhook: A POST request containing a FHIR Parameters resource with a reference to the
Encounter - HL7 v2 A08: A synthetic HL7 message delivered through your HL7 integration engine
- FHIR Subscription (optional): A synthetic
Bundleresource withclinicalAlerts=truecriteria
4. How long does it take to receive a Clinical Alert?
Clinical Alerts are typically delivered within 4 to 24 hours after the network event that triggers polling and document retrieval.
5. What if my webhook endpoint is unavailable?
Webhook alerts are retried automatically using an exponential backoff strategy if your endpoint returns a non-2XX HTTP status. Persistent failures mark the alert as undeliverable after retry attempts are exhausted.
6. Are Clinical Alerts stored in Health Gorilla after delivery?
No. Health Gorilla does not retain Clinical Alert payloads after successful delivery. You are responsible for logging and storing alerts in your system.
7. Are Clinical Alerts retroactive?
No. A Clinical Alert is only generated if the patient was enrolled at the time of the triggering network activity. Alerts are not backfilled for past events.
8. How can I confirm which patients are enrolled?
Use the FHIR Group @members operation to view the current list of enrolled patients.
9. What if I receive duplicate alerts?
Health Gorilla deduplicates alerts internally based on patient ID, encounter ID, and timestamps. However, you should implement basic deduplication in your system to handle retries or message replays.
10. How do I retrieve the Encounter referenced in a Clinical Alert?
- For webhooks: Extract the
encounter.idfrom the Parameters payload and retrieve the resource with a FHIR read request. - For HL7: Extract the Encounter ID from the PV1-19 field and the Patient ID from PID-3.
11. How do I update my Clinical Alert delivery endpoint?
Contact your Client Success Manager (CSM) or Health Gorilla Support before making any endpoint changes. Health Gorilla will assist with validation to ensure uninterrupted delivery.
12. Are Clinical Alerts part of TEFCA transactions?
No. Clinical Alerts are a Health Gorilla value-added service based on monitoring document exchange activity across national networks. They do not constitute a formal TEFCA transaction.
13. Are Clinical Alerts related to Quest or historical data aggregation?
No. Clinical Alerts are triggered by real-time document exchange activity and are not tied to Quest or other historical data services. They monitor new network activity only.
14. Are Clinical Alerts HIPAA-compliant?
Yes. All Clinical Alerts are encrypted in transit, access-controlled, logged for auditing, and managed in accordance with Health Gorilla’s HIPAA compliance policies.