Get started with digital record retrieval

Digital record retrieval enables you to access the Carequality Interoperability Framework—a nationwide network of healthcare organizations—to obtain information about a patient and their medical history, including clinical details like allergies, diagnoses, and medications, without requiring a relationship with each individual healthcare organization.

The Framework comprises over 600K physicians, 50K clinics, and over 4,200 hospitals and facilitates the exchange of over 150M clinical summary documents every month between Carequality participants.

To gain access to Carequality, you must:

1. Acknowledge the Carequality Connections Terms.
2. Qualify for the permitted purpose of use, which is Treatment, as defined in the HIPAA Privacy Rule at 45 CFR 164.501:

   Treatment

   “Treatment” generally means the provision, coordination, or management of health care and related services by one or more health care providers, including the coordination or management of health care by a health care provider with a third party, consultation between health care providers relating to a patient, or the referral of a patient for health care from one health care provider to another.

3. Provide a National Provider ID (NPI) number so that we may append these to your requests for patient information through the Framework.

If you meet all of the above criteria, you qualify for joining Carequality through Redox. Once you're ready to set up your Carequality account, you can generate your credentials in the dashboard. After clicking the button to generate credentials, all of these values populate in the dashboard:

• Source identifier
• API key
• API secret
• Patient OID
• Organization OID
• Document OID
• Data on demand destination ID

Now you're ready to perform technical validation. We dive into more detail later, but here’s an overview of the steps you must complete:

1. Set up and maintain your organization’s details in the Carequality directory. Register your organization so that you can identify yourself when searching for patients—and so that other Carequality participants can find you and your patients.
2. Find patient records and request patient documents. Search for relevant healthcare organizations where your patient may exist. Once you find them, you can request a list of documents related to your patient and select documents to retrieve. Each Carequality participant responds independently to requests from other participants, so you may see some variation in the detail or structure of the documents that you receive, depending on the organization that provides it.
3. Provide details about your patients to other Carequality participants. In exchange for accessing patient information available through Carequality, you are also required to share your patient demographic and clinical summary documents. Doing this on your own can be burdensome and take months to build and test. With digital record retrieval, we can share your data with the Framework for you—which accelerates your time to value by months.

To complete these steps, you must populate the requests with the appropriate Destination ID in the Meta.Destinations array based on the environment and type of requests:

We recommend reading through the information below first, then referring back as you work through the wizard. Launch the digital record retrieval wizard.  

For sending the relevant requests, you can copy query snippets with curl (learn more about curl), but keep in mind that you need to remove comments (starting with //) and replace any variables (e.g., {{variable here}}) to use the curl examples. 

Alternatively, you can test with the Postman collection and environment provided from the wizard within the dashboard. There are notes within the Postman collection to the right of most of the directories. These comments can help you decide between your options, explain the specific fields, and tell you what may change between production/staging environments or individual queries. The comments also indicate which environment variables change regularly. 

The values are found within the environment and include comments with the following prefixes: