The FHIR R4 Encounter resource is used to capture details about an interaction between a patient and a healthcare provider. It represents the entire span of care provided, including hospital visits, outpatient consultations, or any other health-related interaction. This resource records information such as the encounter type, status, participants, and diagnoses.

Health Gorilla exposes Encounter as part of its FHIR R4 API to support patient-centric access to visit and care episode information.

Use Cases

Tracking patient admissions and discharges
Logging patient encounters during hospital or outpatient visits
Retrieving encounter details for billing and reimbursement
Linking diagnostic reports or procedures to encounters

Scope and Behavior

This documentation describes the FHIR R4 API interface for Encounter. 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 Encounter 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, Encounter is most commonly accessed as part of patient record retrieval workflows, where visit and care episode data may be aggregated from connected clinical systems and normalized for longitudinal review. This resource supports care coordination, billing workflows, and linkage of related clinical resources.

Authentication

All requests require OAuth 2.0 authentication using a Bearer Token. Unauthorized requests return 401 Unauthorized responses.

Required scopes:

encounter.read for GET
encounter.write for 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: 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

Parameter	Description	Example Values	FHIR Data Type
`patient`	Filters by patient	`Patient/{id}`	`Reference`
`status`	Filters by encounter status	`planned`, `in-progress`, `finished`	`token`
`type`	Filters by encounter type	`outpatient`, `inpatient`, `emergency`	`token`
`period`	Filters by encounter period	`ge2024-01-01`, `le2024-12-31`	`date`
`service-provider`	Filters by service provider organization	`Organization/{id}`	`Reference`
`diagnosis`	Filters by related diagnosis	`Condition/{id}`	`Reference`

Commonly Returned Resource Attributes

Attribute	Description	Example Values	FHIR Data Type
`status`	Current status of the encounter	`in-progress`, `finished`	`code`
`class`	Classification of the encounter (e.g., inpatient, outpatient)	`outpatient`, `emergency`, `inpatient`	`Coding`
`type`	Type of the encounter	`office`, `outpatient`	`CodeableConcept[]`
`period`	Duration of the encounter	`2024-02-12T12:34:56Z/2024-02-12T15:34:56Z`	`Period`
`serviceProvider`	Organization responsible for the encounter	`Organization/{id}`	`Reference(Organization)`
`diagnosis`	Diagnoses associated with the encounter	`Condition/{id}`	`BackboneElement[]`
`participant`	Participants involved in the encounter	`Practitioner/{id}`, `RelatedPerson/{id}`	`BackboneElement[]`

Notifications

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

Error Handling

All Encounter operations follow standard Health Gorilla error handling, including use of FHIR OperationOutcome for structured responses. For more information, go to: Error Handling.

Additional Resources

HL7 FHIR Encounter