AllergyIntolerance

The FHIR R4 AllergyIntolerance resource captures information about a patient’s allergies or intolerances to substances such as medications, foods, or environmental agents. This information helps support safe clinical decision-making by documenting known adverse sensitivities and reactions.

Health Gorilla exposes AllergyIntolerance as part of its FHIR R4 API to support patient-centric clinical data access.

Use Cases

  • Retrieving a patient’s known allergies prior to prescribing medications
  • Recording newly identified allergies during patient intake or clinical encounters
  • Reviewing allergy history as part of longitudinal patient records

Scope and Behavior

This documentation describes the FHIR R4 API interface for AllergyIntolerance. Health Gorilla’s platform may use additional internal services and data standards to acquire, normalize, and route clinical information. Only the FHIR R4–exposed behavior is documented here.

Health Gorilla supports a subset of the HL7 FHIR R4 AllergyIntolerance resource. Not all optional elements defined in the HL7 specification may be stored, indexed, or returned. Unsupported or unrecognized elements may be ignored or normalized during processing.

In Health Gorilla, AllergyIntolerance is most commonly accessed as part of patient record retrieval workflows, where allergy data is aggregated from connected clinical sources and normalized for longitudinal review. This resource supports medication safety, care coordination, and clinical review use cases by exposing known allergy and intolerance information alongside other patient clinical data.

Authentication

All requests to the FHIR R4 API require OAuth 2.0 authentication using a bearer token. Unauthorized requests return a 401 Unauthorized response.

Required Scopes

  • allergyintolerance.read for GET
  • allergyintolerance.write for POST, PUT, and DELETE

For details on authentication and token acquisition, see OAuth 2.0 Authentication.

Search Behavior

  • Searches are scoped to the authenticated tenant.
  • The patient parameter is required for patient-scoped searches and is recommended for most search use cases.
  • Results are returned as a FHIR Bundle.
  • Pagination may be applied. Use standard FHIR pagination links (Bundle.link) to retrieve additional result pages.

Note: The parameters listed below are not exhaustive and reflect commonly used fields in typical Health Gorilla workflows. Supported parameters and behavior may vary by configuration.

Frequently Used Search Parameters

ParameterDescriptionExample ValuesFHIR Data Type
patientFilters by patientPatient/{id}Reference
clinicalStatusFilters by current allergy statusactivetoken
verificationStatusFilters by level of certaintyconfirmedtoken
recordedDateFilters by date recordedge2022-01-01, le2023-12-31date
categoryFilters by allergen categoryfood, medicationtoken
codeFilters by allergen substanceSNOMED CT, RxNorm codestoken
recorderFilters by who recorded the allergyPractitioner/{id}Reference
criticalityFilters by potential severityhightoken
onsetFilters by onset datege2020-01-01date
lastOccurrenceFilters by most recent reaction datele2024-12-31date

Commonly Returned Resource Attributes

AttributeDescriptionExample ValuesFHIR Data Type
patientPatient who has the allergy or intolerancePatient/{id}Reference(Patient)
codeAllergen or substanceSNOMED CT or RxNorm codesCodeableConcept
typeType of sensitivityallergy, intolerancecode
categoryAllergen categoryfood, medicationcode[]
criticalityPotential severity if exposedhighcode
clinicalStatusCurrent statusactiveCodeableConcept
verificationStatusCertainty of allergyconfirmedCodeableConcept
onsetWhen the allergy beganYYYY-MM-DDdateTime, Age, Period
recordedDateWhen recordedYYYY-MM-DDdateTime
lastOccurrenceMost recent reactionYYYY-MM-DDdateTime
recorderWho recorded the allergyPractitioner/{id}Reference
reaction.manifestationReaction symptomshives, dyspneaCodeableConcept[]
reaction.severityReaction severitymild, moderate, severecode
reaction.substanceSpecific reaction substancepenicillin GCodeableConcept
reaction.descriptionText descriptionFree textstring

Notifications

The FHIR R4 API does not provide direct resource-change subscriptions for AllergyIntolerance. Changes to allergy information may surface through broader notification workflows, depending on enabled Health Gorilla products and configuration.

Error Handling

All AllergyIntolerance operations use standard Health Gorilla error handling and return a FHIR OperationOutcome resource for structured error details. For more information, go to Error Handling.

Additional Resources