Background

Discharge summaries are one of the most important sources of data when it comes to managing the care of high-risk patient populations. Clinical staff need to review discharge summaries for recently hospitalized patients so that they can determine the critical and time-sensitive follow up actions they need to conduct with the patient to reduce risk of readmission. It is often challenging, however, to find the discharge summaries amidst all of the documents present in a patient record, particularly as the majority of discharge summaries are in unstructured (pdf, png, txt) data formats.

Overview

Discharge Summary Alerts are delivered as part of Transition Alerts. When Particle identifies that a discharge summary document is available for a recently hospitalized patient, a Transition Alert is sent with subject: "Discharge Summary Available". This is typically a follow-on alert after the initial discharge event, once the document has been identified on the network.

Particle uses proprietary logic to identify discharge summaries across CCDA (xml) and non-CCDA (unstructured formats such as pdf, png, txt, etc) data. The alert includes a file_id to retrieve the discharge summary document.

ℹ️

If you are subscribed to Transition Alerts, discharge summary availability is included automatically. No separate subscription is required.

Recommended Implementation

1. Subscribe to alerts by subscribing patients to MONITORING with Transition Alerts enabled. See the Subscriptions API for details.
2. Set up a callback endpoint on your systems and register it with Particle via the steps outlined in Webhook Event Notifications.
3. Receive alerts to your registered callback endpoint when a discharge summary is available for a subscribed patient.
4. Retrieve the discharge summary using the file_id provided in the webhook payload.

Discharge Summary Alert Payload

Discharge Summary Alerts are delivered as Transition Alert webhooks. The subject field is set to "Discharge Summary Available" to distinguish this alert from the initial discharge event.

{
  "specversion": "1.0",
  "type": "com.particlehealth.api.v2.transitionalerts",
  "subject": "Discharge Summary Available",
  "source": "api/notifications",
  "id": "2b3c4d5e-6f70-8901-bc23-de45fg678901",
  "time": "2025-06-19T08:15:00Z",
  "datacontenttype": "application/json",
  "data": {
    "network_organization": {
      "name": "Rochester Hospital",
      "oid": "2.16.840.1.113883.3.8391.5.710576"
    },
    "particle_patient_id": "9c6d9cf3-15c2-4b65-b8e3-836ef6cf2f13",
    "external_patient_id": "external-123",
    "event_type": "Discharge",
    "event_sequence": 2,
    "is_final_event": "true",
    "resources": [
      {
        "file_id": "d6a96f73-eb18-4faa-b021-143e7777fe8b",
        "resource_ids": [
          "transitions/c4e9b1f0-0c2f-4a3e-a3a7-1139fd254d29",
          "document_references/e5f6a7b8-c9d0-1234-5678-90abcdef1234"
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

Note: Typically you will see a single file_id for discharge summaries. In scenarios where Particle identifies multiple discharge summary documents, resources may include multiple entries.

Retrieving Discharge Summary Data

Use the file_id from the webhook payload to retrieve the discharge summary document via the CCDA endpoint:

GET /api/v2/patients/{particle_patient_id}/ccda?file_id={file_id}

Testing

All of these workflows are available to test in our Sandbox environment. See Testing Signal in Sandbox for details.