Record Locator Service

Health Gorilla provides Record Locator Service (RLS) functionality through the List resource. This allows clients to discover where a patient has received care and who was involved, without retrieving the full clinical data. The RLS implementation enables structured discovery of organizations, labs, imaging centers, and practitioners based on Health Gorilla's clinical network.

What is RLS?

A Record Locator Service (RLS) helps participants in a health information network determine:

Where a patient’s records are located
Which organizations or providers contributed data
What types of services were rendered (e.g., lab, imaging, primary care)

It does not return clinical data, but provides metadata about sources, helping clients efficiently plan follow-up queries (e.g., DocumentReference, Provenance, Observation, etc.).

How Health Gorilla Implements RLS

Health Gorilla exposes RLS functionality via:

GET /fhir/R4/List?patient={id}&code={collectionTypes}

The returned List resources contain references to following, as they relate to the specified patient:

Organizations (Organization)
Providers (Practitioner)

Each list is filtered using one or more collection codes, which indicate the type of entities you want to discover.

Base URLs

Production: https://api.healthgorilla.com/fhir/R4/List
Sandbox: https://sandbox.healthgorilla.com/fhir/R4/List

Required Scope

list.read

For more information, go to: OAuth 2.0 Authentication

Supported Query Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
`patient`	`Reference`	FHIR Patient ID (e.g., `Patient/abc123`)
`code`	`token`	One or more comma-separated collection type codes

Supported Collection Types

Code	Display	FHIR Resource	Description
`careorganizations`	Care Organizations	`Organization`	Places where the patient has received care
`laborimaging`	Lab or Imaging	`Organization`	Sources of diagnostic or radiology reports
`providers`	Providers	`Practitioner`	Individuals involved in the patient's care

Example Query

GET /fhir/R4/List?patient=Patient/03db4352ee0190ad5e9e6748&code=careorganizations,laborimaging

Returns lists of:

Care organizations such as clinics and hospitals
Laboratory and imaging centers that submitted diagnostic results for the patient

Example Response (Truncated)

{
  "resourceType": "Bundle",
  "type": "searchset",
  "entry": [
    {
      "resource": {
        "resourceType": "List",
        "id": "rls-careorgs-01",
        "status": "current",
        "mode": "working",
        "title": "Care Organizations",
        "code": {
          "coding": [
            {
              "code": "careorganizations",
              "display": "Care Organizations"
            }
          ]
        },
        "subject": {
          "reference": "Patient/03db4352ee0190ad5e9e6748"
        },
        "entry": [
          {
            "item": {
              "reference": "Organization/abc123",
              "display": "ABC Primary Care"
            }
          },
          {
            "item": {
              "reference": "Organization/xyz456",
              "display": "Radiology West"
            }
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

Use Cases

Build a directory of organizations and providers involved in a patient's care
Audit data contributors before requesting clinical content
Limit downstream data queries to known or trusted sources
Prefetch provenance and document records by known origin

Relationship to Provenance

After identifying source organizations or providers using the List resource, you can retrieve provenance records that explain how and when those resources were created.

Example query by target resource: GET /Provenance?target=Observation/{id}
Example query by patient: GET /Provenance?patient=Patient/{id}

These queries return provenance metadata for linked resources, including the agent, system, or organization responsible for the original submission.

Error Handling

All List queries follow standard Health Gorilla error handling and return structured FHIR OperationOutcome responses for issues such as invalid parameters, unauthorized access, or missing patient context. For more information, go to: Error Handling