Document Submission (DS)

The Document Submission service provides a mechanism to send documents to another organization, unsolicited by a call to the Query for Documents service or other mechanism, and therefore implementing a "push" exchange pattern. The service can be viewed as submitting document(s) that must be processed or stored by the receiving system and sending document(s) including health information to exchange partners.

The Document Submission service provides the ability for one organization to "push" identified health information for a given patient from one system to another, triggered by events at the submitting organization. Document Submission provides a different model of exchange than the publish and subscribe model implemented by Health Information Event Messaging as the sending organization determines what organizations should receive the information and what information to send, and the receiving organization receives that information on appropriate and available endpoints from sources it authorizes.

The Document Submission service allows a system to send an individual document or sets of documents to other organizations and allows the responder to receive the submission, audit the submission, and process the document as appropriate. In this context, a "document" refers to the form of electronic health information as it is transferred between systems, not as it is stored in an HIE or system. Any HIE or system may store health information in whatever format or repository it chooses.
Document Submission normally requires that the patient ID of the receiving organization be known, and therefore the Document Submission service may be used in conjunction with the Patient Discovery service to retrieve the patient ID of matching patients.
CONNECT includes services to receive documents in response to requests and to submit documents to other organizations.