Integration Data Release

Hint’s is proud to release Integration Data! This represents the first step towards tighter integrations that our mutual customers are demanding between Hint and you, our awesome API partners.

Today’s release solves the problem of establishing strong links between records in Hint, and the corresponding record in your database. Integration Data supports this on the Patient, CustomerInvoice, and Practitioner endpoints by adding a new field integration_record_id, where you can store your system’s ID for a given Hint record.
What’s great about Integration Data is the flexibility and security. The infrastructure we’ve put in place lets Hint Patients have multiple integrations simultaneously, while still ensuring each API Partner will only see their own data. This is more secure, plus keeps the interface for you, the developer, very simple.

Hint’s current solutions for this (import_id/source, and external_link_id) were confusing, and so have been deprecated. We will continue to support those legacy fields for the time being. But we now strongly encourage partners to switch to the Integration Data system. The actual migration is simple. Just change any instances where you were using import_id, import_source, or external_link_id to just be integration_record_id.

See technical details about using Integration Data below.

What is it?

Hint’s API will now accept integration_record_id as an additional parameter for create and update calls on the Patient, CustomerInvoice, and Practitioner endpoints. This field is where you should add the ID to link the Hint record with the corresponding record in your database.

Also, with Integration Data, we now support using either the Hint ID, or your id when identifying records on Hint’s API. For example if your id is emr-90210 and Hint’s patient id is pat-n32hjf4mmu1s, then assuming you’ve set the integration_record_id, you can either GET /patients/pat-n32hjf4mmu1s OR /patients/emr-90210. This works all places you previously needed the hint id, including PATCH, PUT, and DELETE.

How do I use it?

If patient Joe Sample in your database has id joe-123, and that patient is linked to Joe Sample in Hint’s database, then you would update Joe’s Hint record with {integration_record_id: “joe-123”}. Then every time you GET this patient, you’ll see this integration_record_id in the response.

How do I migrate?

If you’re currently using external_link_id, then simply change that field to integration_record_id. If you’re using import_id and import_source in tandem, then delete import_source, and change import_id to integration_record_id. That’s it!

Starting on April 1st, 2017, we’ll remove those fields (external_link_id, and import_id/source) from the API. From that point on, we will only support integration_record_id. We will automatically migrate any existing data to use the Integration Data system, but further calls to affected endpoints will ignore the legacy fields.