Frequently Asked Questions
Fast, easy access to healthcare data is now possible through our modern API platform. Here are some of the most commonly asked questions to help you get started.
Particle Health’s interoperability platform delivers actionable patient data and insights to healthcare companies, in ways that efficiently tie into their existing workflows. Particle’s API can bi-directionally share data for 300M+ patients, finding records on average 90% of the time, with an average of 135 records per search. Particle’s data products also ensure that clinicians are not inundated with more data, but rather armed with the right data.
Our platform aggregates this data from separate health information networks across the USA, and converts it into multiple formats for compatibility purposes. If you think this is revolutionizing care, you’re right!
Our API is easy to use and only requires a simple set of patient demographic information to query the network. The Particle API has access to the digital medical records of over 300 million unique lives across the United States.
When we successfully match a patient (which happens, on average, over 90% of the time), you can receive data in both mainstream formats: C-CDA and FHIR R4. FHIR is generated through our transformation pipeline and based on the C-CDA documents we receive from EMRs.
To learn more about how Particle works, create a free Portal account, browse our “not-a-blog” showcase, or send an email to go@particlehealth.com!
Forget about signing agreements one by one. You only need to complete our single contract and BAA for instant access to every hospital, clinic, practice, and HIE in our network. That’s over 270 million covered lives.
We’ve developed a proprietary record locator service (RLS), which allows for an industry-leading query success rate in the most efficient (read: fastest) manner. Like all record locator services, we use the patient's home location to perform a radius search. We also leverage other heuristics and patient registries that we’re connected to in order to enhance performance.
Our premium Specialty Search capability queries condition-specific Centers of Excellence for oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, orthopedics, nephrology, pulmonology, and gastroenterology, regardless of location, as they tend to have patient records for chronic conditions.
Anyone with a valid Purpose of Use (PoU) can query the paid, live version of Particle’s API. (And anyone can play with test data for free in Particle’s developer portal!)
To access Particle’s API and query for patient files under the Treatment PoU, you must be a HIPAA-covered entity or hold a BAA with a covered entity.
Vendors that sell to HIPAA-covered entities, including EHR developers, may also be able to implement Particle’s API on behalf of their clients.
Our team is experienced at helping organizations navigate different Purposes of Use. If you’d like to understand what your organization would need to query data, reach out to our team so that we can learn more about how you hope to use the Particle platform!
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) includes privacy and security rules to ensure health data is only shared for appropriate purposes. HIPAA permits several "Purposes of Use" (PoU) that depend on how patient data is used; these include Treatment, Payment, Operations, Individual Access, and several others.
The PoUs with the highest rate of data return are those that come under the “Treatment” definition. Put simply: these are requests that are initiated by a provider on behalf of their patient, and are used for the purposes of treating that patient. Because the request is going through a provider, the data holders across the networks Particle connects to are much more willing to respond to these requests.
Requests for the purposes of Payment (like claims adjudication) or Individual Access (Jane Doe requesting her own records), for example, are not supported by all health information networks. As such, we’ve prioritized working with groups whose primary use case falls under the Treatment PoU.
Organizations without any Treatment PoU cannot query the live version of Particle’s powerful API. However, patient access, payments, population research, and healthcare operations may be permitted PoUs in the near future, so we encourage you to sign up for our developer portal and newsletter for the most up-to-date communication on where this stands with the networks.
No matter what PoUs your organization may have, we want you to reach out to Particle to discuss solutions. We're happy to speak with you more about how these PoUs relate to data access, how our customers can use data, and how your use case aligns with each Purpose of Use!
Talk to us! Before providing access to live patient data, we will work with you to ensure that you can query for the specific data you need in a way that complies with federal and local policies.
Good question, but not at this time. Particle’s API is designed for heavily regulated healthcare activities and must correspond to universally accepted principles that you, Particle, and our other health data sources share. Our network is built on trust, and compliance is part of our user agreement.
No, our API does not rely on logging into patient portals. If you can provide basic demographic information on your patients - their family name, given name, phone number, and address - we can quickly and reliably pull records without the need for any additional information on the patient.
Particle Health has been independently audited to earn both the HITRUST Implemented i1 Validated Assessment and SOC 2 Type 2 certification. HITRUST Assessment Certifications offer reliable assurances that an organization is staying up-to-date with the latest security and privacy standards to ensure that sensitive data is effectively and efficiently safeguarded. SOC 2 is both a technical audit and a requirement that comprehensive information security policies and procedures are written and followed.Achieving these certifications means that our systems and internal practices have not only met these demanding standards, but have done so over a consistent period of time.
- Data at rest is encrypted using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).
- Google Cloud provides cryptographic authentication and authorization for all inter-service communications.
- Mutual TLS is used for authenticating outgoing requests.
- All PHI is de-identified when used for internal analytics.
Particle sticks to additional best practices, including employee security training, vulnerability monitoring and a bug bounty program. We meet and exceed all legislative requirements regarding access to Protected Health Information, maintaining both the letter and the spirit of these critically important laws. Particle began with developers in mind, and security is in our DNA.
Reach out to us today! We’ll answer any questions your team has about Particle’s API or healthcare interoperability.
Our API aggregates a wide range of clinical data, from medications to vitals to diagnoses. Our data set is currently based on the widely used USCDI v2 data standard, which virtually all network participants will have in common.
USCDI is defined by ONC (the federal agency which coordinates interoperability) and is meant to encompass all clinical data points that holders of medical data are required to share. ONC regularly expands the scope of this data set as interoperability efforts gain increased national traction.
Optionally, our API can also deliver nearly real-time HL7 ADT (admission, discharge, transfer) messages, encompassing care transition alerts from over 10,000 facilities across the US. These supplement Particle’s clinical data queries to give additional context around an acute patient event, while enabling timely care interventions.
The Particle API will return a range of CDA documents. The most common ones we find are: Continuity of Care Documents, Office Visit Summaries, Lab Orders, Refill Orders, and Doctor Notes.
These documents include robust clinical information such as allergies, immunizations, and vitals. They come from sources like hospitals, specialists, and ambulatory facilities.
Additionally, we’ve developed a data transformation pipeline that converts the CDA documents that we receive from the EMRs into FHIR R4, which gives our clients additional control over which data to use and how to use it. For example, using FHIR you could just download medications from the last two years instead of a full medical record.
Your test results, visit notes, and vital signs are all clinical documents. FHIR and C-CDA are the two primary data formats used to electronically share these medical records.
C-CDA documents need specialized parsing to extract individual data points from patient records. FHIR documents are easier to query for specific aspects of patient encounters. Particle’s developer tools can convert C-CDA documents into the FHIR format.
Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is the newest generation of electronic health record exchange. It’s an open source format overseen by HL7, the same organization that developed the widely-used C-CDA standard. Unlike C-CDA, the FHIR format has a foundation in modern web standards like JSON and RESTful architecture.
All exchangeable content in the FHIR standard is contained in a resource. Instead of sharing a patient’s fixed XML record with everyone who requests it, FHIR lets organizations request targeted, relevant resources. Federal guidelines increasingly require the use of FHIR in health IT.
We’re excited to help organizations discover FHIR. Our engineering team has a great deal of FHIR experience to share, and our API makes it easy for organizations to integrate with this format. Learn more about FHIR here or check out our API reference documents.
No. We’re specializing in United States healthcare data at this time.
We typically find data on at least 85% of patients entered into our API, though some customers have seen success rates approaching 95%. On average, we return about 125 files for every patient that we locate!
We pride ourselves in having a best-in-class solution for quickly and accurately finding healthcare data, which covers about 270 million patient lives across the US (and more every day!).
No! Our proprietary record locator service (RLS) searches for your patients’ records across many endpoints. Our amazing API doesn’t need to ask you where a patient has received care.
Particle’s API uses the Client Credentials Flow of the OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework. The Client Credentials flow is a widely adopted authorization flow used primarily for system-to-system communication. Organization-controlled service accounts, or verified users of an organization, use generated client credentials to retrieve a JSON Web Token which allows scoped access to Particle’s APIs.
Particle Health currently does not attempt to match patients before receiving a query request. Patient matching is handled by either one of the centralized network entities we connect to, or whichever individual organization is the original source of the data. Each organization in our network may thus have its own criteria and threshold for what constitutes a safe and accurate patient match.
The best way to get a patient match and pull the associated data is to submit as much valid demographic data as you have during your initial query. Particle Health is very involved in patient matching optimization efforts with our network partners, and our team will work with you to determine how you can optimize your results.
Reach out to us today! We’ll answer any questions your team has about Particle’s API or healthcare interoperability.
Our API is simple and straightforward. As soon as a partnership agreement is in place between you and the Particle team, production querying can begin immediately!
Our client success experts will help map out your optimal integration path. We’ll ask which data points are most important to you, and how you plan to use patient data.
Developers can get a head start today by logging into our Developer Portal for hands-on experience with our API.
Once testing begins, we’ve seen full implementations take anywhere from a couple of weeks to several months. It all depends on your use case, team, and planning timeline (including sprints and roadmap expectations).
You'll need a patient's:
- First & Last Name
- Date of Birth
- ZIP Code
- Gender
- Street Address (optional, but recommended)
Optional fields that can increate match percentage includes:
- Phone Number
- Email Address
- SSN
Yes. The patient’s address will increase the chance of a successful match.
The National Provider Identifier is used for tracking purposes to help us and our networks understand who is querying for patient data. It is not required, but if available, using an NPI can be quite helpful in the case of an audit.
The more data you submit in the initial POST of demographic information, the better. Including the patient’s street address and phone number can also significantly increase the likelihood of finding a match.
Our premium Specialty Search capability can increase the match rate and number of files found for select medical disciplines including oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, orthopedics, nephrology, pulmonology, and gastroenterology.
Most EHR solutions have native C-CDA viewers as a requirement of Meaningful Use. If you don’t have access to these viewers, we host a secure C-CDA viewer within our customer portal that is free to use and is built using this open source viewer.
We generally recommend that both business and technical stakeholders be involved in the scoping and
implementation process. This could include your:
- Product Manager
- Business Analyst
- Software Engineer(s)
- Data Scientist(s)
- Strategy & Operations Lead
Your team will simply add a new condition-specific parameter to each query that you want to apply Specialty Search to. Specialty Search is a premium feature and must be turned on for your organization before it is active.
Particle for EHRs is an administrative tool that allows EHR developers to give their customers access to Particle’s core platform via an EHR.
End users will interact with the exact same API whether they connect on their own or through a Particle for EHRs implementation. Particle for EHRs and our core API have the same functionality.
Particle for EHRs can be promoted by an EHR or platform service provider as a feature. It does not need to be marketed as a Particle product. Particle does not make any references to itself in the documents that it delivers in response to queries.
Reach out to us today! We’ll answer any questions your team has about Particle’s API or healthcare interoperability.
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