Overview

For many of our customers, it's critical to have timely visibility into any interactions their patients are having with the healthcare system in order to take appropriate action to prevent costly complications. This is true both for planned encounters, such as specialist referrals and routine visits, and for unplanned encounters such as ER visits and inpatient admissions.

Particle's Signal solution enables customers to provide a cohort of patients for Particle to monitor for any new encounters on the national HINs (Carequality, Commonwell, eHealthExchange) and Particle's state HIE and ADT partners.

When Particle identifies a critical new clinical event for a patient that a customer is monitoring, we will send the customer an alert via webhook notification. The alert will include key details on the event (e.g., which facility the event occurred at) and information to pull the additional, critical clinical context (e.g., the fileID to retrieve the relevant discharge summary file).

Example Patient Journey

Here's a real-world example of the care journey for a patient who is enrolled in Signal and is admitted to the hospital, and the alerts that a customer will receive from Particle at each stage.

Signal Alerts

Customers will integrate Signal alerts into their existing clinical workflows and queues to inform when to take action to prevent costly complications for a patient, and what actions to take. There are two general categories of alerts that Particle will send to a customer for any patients enrolled in Signal, which will typically trigger different customer workflows.

1. Event Detected

Alerts that fall under this category will notify a customer when any new activity is occurring for their patients on the networks. Timeliness is a critical aspect of these alerts - while the alerts will not necessarily include the full clinical context on the patient encounter, they will inform the customer as soon as possible that new activity has occurred. This gives customers the option to outreach the patient and/or the facility to capture any additional information.

"Event Detected" alerts include:

2. Data Available

Alerts that fall under this category will notify a customer when critical new clinical data is available for review for their patients. These alerts provide the critical clinical context on any patient encounters that have occurred, to inform the customer of what type(s) of patient follow needs to be conducted to prevent costly complications (e.g., readmissions). In addition, these alerts will highlight the key documents and resources relevant to the clinical event, so that the customer has the full context readily available without needing to sift through irrelevant documents.

"Data Available" alerts include:

Configuring Signal

You’ll need to complete the steps outlined below to set up Signal for your patient population. Note that if you have already implemented with other Particle APIs, these steps follow the same model as our existing Deltas query flow and webhook notifications, with an additional optional step (#3) to enable you to select which patients you want to monitor.

1. Generate a JSON Web Token, as outlined in Authentication.
2. Create patient(s) using the Patients API and store the Particle Patient IDs for each patient.
3. Subscribe to Signal notifications for subset of patients using the Subscriptions API. This step is only necessary if you just want to specify a subset of patients to monitor. If you want to monitor ALL patients, Particle will enable Signal for all patients for your organization.
4. Create a callback endpoint (on your systems) and register it with Particle via the steps outlined in Event Notifications.
5. Receive Signal Alerts & Clinical Context to your registered callback endpoint when new events are detected or new data is available for your patients.
6. Retrieve clinical context associated with Signal Alerts in FHIR or FLAT format via the Deltas API, and any raw ADTs in HL7v2 format via the HL7v2 API and raw non-CCDA documents via the Files API.

ℹ️

Particle provides customers with the flexibility to specify how much clinical context they want to retrieve for a given alert (e.g., full history, data delta, new file, or new encounter only).

The majority of the data is available in all supported formats (CCDA, FHIR, FLAT), with a few key exceptions (ADT msgs, non-CCDA discharge summary data). See Signal Alerts & Clinical Context for more detail.