The FHIR R4 Location resource describes the physical or virtual place where healthcare services are provided. This includes clinics, hospitals, departments, and telehealth service locations. It is commonly referenced by other resources like Encounter, PractitionerRole, and Organization.

Health Gorilla exposes Location as part of its FHIR R4 API to support identification and reference of service delivery sites across clinical workflows.

Use Cases

Identifying the facility where a patient was seen or treated
Associating a provider with a specific service location
Filtering encounters or appointments by location

Scope and Behavior

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

Health Gorilla supports a subset of the HL7 FHIR R4 Location 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, Location is most commonly accessed as part of patient record retrieval and administrative workflows, where facility and service site information is referenced by encounters, appointments, and practitioner roles.

Authentication

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

Required Scope

location.read for GET

For more information, go to: OAuth 2.0 Authentication.

Search Behavior

Searches are scoped to the authenticated tenant. 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
`name`	Filters by location name	`"Downtown Clinic"`	`string`
`address`	Matches any part of the address	`"Sunnyvale"`	`string`
`identifier`	Filters by facility identifier	`1234567`	`token`
`organization`	Filters by managing organization	`Organization/{id}`	`Reference`
`_id`	Filters by Location resource ID	`6b2a8a16-2131-49fb-b5f7-ef8cfe2a9a6c`	`token`

Commonly Returned Resource Attributes

Attribute	Description	Example Values	FHIR Data Type
`id`	Unique FHIR ID for the location	`6b2a8a16-2131-49fb-b5f7-ef8cfe2a9a6c`	`id`
`name`	Name of the location	`"Health Gorilla Main Clinic"`	`string`
`status`	Whether the location record is active	`active`, `suspended`, `inactive`	`code`
`mode`	Indicates instance vs kind	`instance`, `kind`	`code`
`type`	Type of facility or location	`outpatient clinic`, `lab`, `pharmacy`	`CodeableConcept[]`
`address`	Physical or mailing address	City, state, postal code	`Address`
`telecom`	Contact information	Phone, fax	`ContactPoint[]`
`managingOrganization`	Organization responsible for the location	`Organization/{id}`	`Reference(Organization)`
`partOf`	Larger location that this is part of	`Location/{id}`	`Reference(Location)`
`position`	Geographic coordinates	`latitude: 37.37, longitude: -122.03`	`BackboneElement`

Notifications

The FHIR R4 API does not provide direct resource-change subscriptions for Location. Location resources may appear in payloads for related resources such as Encounter, PractitionerRole, or Appointment.

Error Handling

All Location 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 Location