Clinical Alerts

As a feature of Patient360, Clinical Alerts notifies you of patient activity detected across national health networks. It inherits Patient360's identity resolution to link alerts to enrolled patients and document retrieval to deliver the source document.

Core Function

Detection is based on network document exchange, which provides cross-setting visibility into patient activity wherever participating organizations share clinical information. This includes inpatient, outpatient, emergency, post-acute, and specialty care settings.

Not all network activity qualifies. Detection responds only to a query that another organization submits with the treatment exchange purpose, meaning the reason that organization gives for requesting the record. A query made for payment, health care operations, or any other purpose produces no alert.

Alerts indicate that qualifying activity occurred. For organizations with the C-CDA storage license, the source document associated with each alert is available on the patient's chart for review or follow-up.

Alert Types

Clinical Alerts delivers two notification types. Your organization subscribes to each one separately, so receiving one doesn't mean you receive the other.

Clinical Alert: Arrives when a clinical document for an enrolled patient becomes available, confirming that qualifying activity occurred.
Leading Indicator: Arrives when another organization queries an enrolled patient, through either patient discovery or a document query. An indicator reports that a query occurred and carries no clinical document.

Key Capabilities

The following capabilities describe how Clinical Alerts operate and what each alert delivers:

Document-driven detection: Triggered by clinical document exchange between participating organizations
Cross-setting visibility: Awareness across multiple care environments
Source document availability: For licensed organizations, the source document is available on the patient's chart
Notification delivery: FHIR Subscription or Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)

Use Cases

Organizations implement Clinical Alerts to support:

Care coordination and case-management workflows
High-risk patient monitoring and outreach programs
Emergency department, outpatient, and inpatient visit awareness
Transition-of-care and post-acute follow-up
Population health and utilization monitoring programs

Important Limitations

Clinical Alerts provides situational awareness based on observed document exchange activity. It does not replace facility-generated HL7 v2 ADT feeds, does not guarantee detection of all encounters, and should not be treated as an authoritative encounter history.