The FHIR R4 ElectronicFax resource is used to represent fax transmission details for sending healthcare-related documents via fax. It supports the transmission of clinical records, prescriptions, referrals, and other important medical documents, ensuring secure and efficient sharing of information between providers.
Health Gorilla exposes ElectronicFax as part of its FHIR R4 API to support secure transmission and tracking of healthcare-related documents via fax workflows.
Use Cases
- Sending clinical documents via fax to external providers
- Receiving incoming faxes and linking them to patient records
- Tracking fax transmission statuses and errors
- Archiving faxed documents for patient record keeping
- Integrating faxed documents into EHR workflows
Scope and Behavior
This documentation describes the FHIR R4 API interface for ElectronicFax. Health Gorilla’s platform may use additional internal services and data standards to acquire, normalize, and route information. Only the FHIR R4–exposed behavior is documented here.
The ElectronicFax resource represents a Health Gorilla–specific extension and is not part of the HL7 FHIR R4 core specification.
Authentication
All requests to the FHIR R4 API require OAuth 2.0 authentication using a bearer token. Unauthorized requests return 401 Unauthorized responses.
Required scopes:
electronicfax.readfor GETelectronicfax.writefor POST, PUT, DELETE
For more information, go to: 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: Supported parameters and behavior may vary by configuration.
Search Parameters
Faxes are retrieved by identifier, which Health Gorilla assigns.
| Parameter | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
identifier | Yes | Returns the fax carrying the given Health Gorilla identifier. |
direction | No | Filters on whether the fax was sent or received. |
_lastUpdated | No | Filters on when the record was last written in the Health Gorilla FHIR server. Accepts a comparison prefix, for example ge2025-01-01. |
_offset | No | Skips the given number of results. |
_count | No | Limits the number of results returned per page. |
Resource Attributes
| Attribute | Description | Example Values | FHIR Data Type |
|---|---|---|---|
patient | Reference to the patient associated with the fax transmission | Patient/{id} | Reference(Patient) |
status | Current status of the fax transmission | sent, failed | [code] |
dateSent | Date the fax was sent | 2024-02-12T12:34:56Z | dateTime |
recipient | Recipient of the fax | Practitioner/{id}, Organization/{id} | Reference |
documentReference | Reference to the document being transmitted | DocumentReference/{id} | Reference(DocumentReference) |
Notifications
The FHIR R4 API does not provide direct resource-change subscriptions for ElectronicFax. Changes to fax transmission information may surface through broader notification workflows, depending on enabled Health Gorilla products and configuration.
Error Handling
All ElectronicFax operations follow standard Health Gorilla error handling, including use of FHIR OperationOutcome for structured responses. For more information, go to: Error Handling.