What are Awell Extensions?
Extensions connect a care flow to the outside world: health records, messaging, scheduling, and in-house apps, so data and actions move automatically instead of by hand.
A care flow rarely works alone. It needs to send a message, look something up in an electronic health record, or call one of the customer's own services. Awell Extensions are the connectors that let it do that automatically, so no one has to be the glue between systems.
Without a connector, the hand-off happens by hand
A hand-off done by hand is slow, and it's where data goes missing: someone copies a result out of one tool and re-keys it into another, or a step waits on a person to remember to make a call.
An extension turns that hand-off into a step the care flow runs itself. It is an adapter between Awell and a specific system: the care flow says "do this," the extension knows how to talk to the other side, and the result comes back into the flow.
Public for known platforms, private for in-house apps
| Public extension | Private extension | |
|---|---|---|
| What it connects | Established third-party platforms | Internal or proprietary apps |
| Who builds it | Awell (community contributions welcome) | The customer's own team |
| Where to find it | The Awell Marketplace | In the owning organization only |
| Visibility | Available to everyone | Unpublished, private to the owner |
| Built with | — | Awell's extension SDK/API |
Public extensions
Public extensions are pre-built integrations with established platforms, discoverable in the Awell Marketplace. Awell builds and maintains most of them, and community contributions are welcome. Where a common tool is already covered, use the existing extension rather than building one.
Private extensions
Reaching an internal or proprietary app means building a private extension on Awell's extension SDK/API. It stays unpublished and private to the organization that built it, so internal systems get connected without anything appearing on the Marketplace.
What an extension gives a care flow
An extension packages what a care flow can do with an external system as pieces an author drops into a flow. Broadly, three kinds:
- Actions — a step that does something in the other system, or reads something out of it. This is most of what an extension is.
- Settings — the connection details an extension needs once, per organization: a base URL, an API key, an account identifier.
- Webhooks — events the other system sends in, which a care flow can start or advance on. Not every extension has these; where one does, you subscribe to them when creating an incoming webhook.
Anything an action returns can be stored as a data point, so a later step in the flow can branch on it.
What that looks like in practice
The range is wide, because the systems are. A few of the 58 extensions in the Marketplace:
| Extension | What a care flow can do with it |
|---|---|
| Elation, Athenahealth, Epic | Read and write in the EHR — appointments, notes, patient records |
| Twilio | Send an SMS from a step in the flow |
| WestFax | Send a fax, which is still how a lot of referrals move |
| HubSpot | Keep a CRM record in step with what the care flow did |
| Healthie | Appointments, tasks, charting notes, and events flowing back in |
A single extension often exposes dozens of actions — Healthie alone offers Apply tag to a patient, Archive patient, Cancel appointment, Create charting note and dozens besides. Each Marketplace page lists what that extension offers and what it needs configured.
Example
A post-discharge care flow needs to check in with the patient and adjust based on their risk score:
- A public messaging extension sends an SMS check-in 48 hours after discharge.
- A private extension calls an internal scoring service and returns the patient's risk score as a data point.
- The care flow branches on that score, routing higher-risk patients to a nurse review step.
The care flow coordinates all three hand-offs without a person in the middle.
(Illustrative, synthetic example. Not a real patient or configuration.)
Next steps
- Add a custom action to a step. Use an extension inside a care flow.
- Marketplace. Which integrations already exist.
- Build your own extension. Connect an internal app.