Health Gorilla vs ROOK

Health Gorilla

A TEFCA QHIN with a FHIR R4 API, OpenAPI fragments on every reference page, idempotency keys on POST and dated weekly release notes. Access is sales-led, with case-by-case fees, a sandbox by request and no published rate limit numbers, and the API terms allow access to be cut at any time.

ROOK

Graded on the REST API. A public OpenAPI file, a free Sandbox from the self-serve portal, published plan prices and a dated changelog. Credentials are one client UUID and secret per environment with no scopes, 429 handling isn't documented, the API is meant for occasional queries rather than bulk reads, and no SOC 2 report or security contact was found.

Health Gorilla

1. Send a fresh UUID in HG-Idempotency-Key on every POST and reuse it only when retrying the same payload
2. Poll async operations no sooner than the Retry-After value and treat 454 as an expired result
3. Follow link.relation=next in Bundles rather than building offsets yourself
4. Expect mocked Patient360 data in sandbox unless network connectivity is enabled for the tenant
5. Log X-HG-Request-Id from each response for support cases

ROOK

1. Send HTTP Basic auth with client_uuid as the username and the secret key as the password, plus a User-Agent header, or the WAF returns 403
2. Use https://api.rook-connect.review for Sandbox and https://api.rook-connect.com for production. Each has its own credentials
3. Read health data from the data webhook. Use the API only for occasional queries, and stay under 60 requests a minute
4. Deduplicate summaries on document_version and datetime. ROOK resends a summary with a higher document_version when it changes
5. Call POST /api/v1/user_id/{user_id}/data_sources/revoke_auth to end a connection. Some providers take hours to stop sending data