FAQs
When you begin processing Clinical Alerts, you may encounter common questions about delivery timing, alert generation behavior, enrollment behavior, or downstream handling expectations. 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-driven clinical activity for an enrolled patient after a query or retrieval has occurred across a national network.
2. What types of events generate Clinical Alerts?
You receive a Clinical Alert when document-driven activity indicates a meaningful clinical event, such as an admission, discharge, transfer, or encounter update, based on inferred encounter context derived from exchanged clinical documents.
Administrative, financial, scheduling, and eligibility-related documents do not generate Clinical Alerts.
3. How are Clinical Alerts delivered?
Clinical Alerts are delivered using your organization's chosen delivery method.
You can choose one of the following delivery methods:
- FHIR Subscription: Event-driven notifications are delivered to your HTTPS endpoint using webhook transport. The payload references inferred encounter context using FHIR-based structures.
- SFTP: Alerts are delivered as files written to a configured SFTP destination using batch-oriented routing.
4. How long does it take to receive a Clinical Alert?
Clinical Alerts are event driven and asynchronous. Alerts are typically delivered hours after qualifying document activity occurs, but timing depends on:
- When documents become available on the network
- Processing queues and system conditions
- The configured delivery method
5. What if my webhook endpoint is unavailable?
If your endpoint returns a non-2xx HTTP status, delivery attempts are treated as failures and may be retried based on tenant configuration.
6. Are Clinical Alerts stored in Health Gorilla after delivery?
No. Health Gorilla does not persist Clinical Alert payloads after successful delivery. Your organization is responsible for logging, auditing, and retaining alert data within your system.
7. Are Clinical Alerts retroactive?
No. Clinical Alerts are generated only if the patient is enrolled at the time qualifying document activity is processed. Alerts are not backfilled for past activity.
8. How can I confirm which patients are enrolled?
Enrollment visibility depends on your enrollment model.
- For limited group enrollment, you can confirm enrollment by reviewing the membership of the FHIR Group your organization manages.
- For all-tenant enrollment, all patients associated with the tenant are eligible by definition.
Clinical Alerts does not provide a separate enrollment status endpoint outside of enrollment configuration workflows.
9. What if I receive duplicate alerts?
Health Gorilla applies internal safeguards to avoid generating duplicate alerts for the same observed activity. However, delivery retries may still result in repeated transmission of the same alert.
Your system should implement basic deduplication logic using identifiers such as:
- Patient identifier
- Encounter identifier
- Event timing
10. How do I retrieve the Encounter referenced in a Clinical Alert?
Clinical Alerts provide encounter-level context, not full clinical records. Your system can use the identifiers and metadata included in the alert to:
- Correlate the alert with internal patient records
- Trigger downstream clinical or operational workflows
- Decide whether to initiate record retrieval using Patient360, when additional clinical detail is required
11. How do I update my Clinical Alert delivery endpoint?
Contact Health Gorilla before making any delivery 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 solution based on monitoring document exchange activity across national health information networks. They do not constitute a formal TEFCA transaction.
13. Are Clinical Alerts related to Quest or historical data aggregation?
No. Clinical Alerts monitors new document-driven activity only. It does not surface historical data and is not tied to laboratory result aggregation or historical record compilation.
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.