What are Awell Extensions?
Extensions connect a care flow to the outside world — EHRs, messaging, scheduling, and your own 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 your EHR, or call one of your own services. Awell Extensions are the connectors that let it do that automatically — so your team isn't the glue between systems.
Why extensions exist
Every time a care flow needs something from another system, that hand-off has to happen somehow. Without a connector, it happens by hand: 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. That's slow, and it's where data goes missing.
An extension turns that hand-off into a step the care flow runs itself. Think of it as 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.
The two kinds of extension
| Public extension | Private extension | |
|---|---|---|
| What it connects | Established third-party platforms | Your own internal or proprietary apps |
| Who builds it | Awell (community contributions welcome) | Your team |
| Where you find it | The Awell Marketplace | In your organization only |
| Visibility | Available to everyone | Unpublished, private to you |
| 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. If a common tool is already covered, you connect it rather than build it.
Private extensions
When you need to reach an internal or proprietary app, you build a private extension on Awell's extension SDK/API. It stays unpublished and private to your organization, so you can integrate your own systems without exposing anything to the Marketplace.
What an extension gives a care flow
An extension packages up the specific things a care flow can do with an external system — for example, sending a message, creating a record, or fetching a value — so those become steps you can drop into a flow.
TODO: verify with SME — confirm the exact building blocks an extension exposes (actions, settings, webhooks, data points) and their canonical names before this section is treated as authoritative.
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 your 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.
None of those hand-offs needs a person in the middle. The care flow does the coordinating.
(Illustrative, synthetic example — not a real patient or configuration.)
Next steps
- Use an extension in a care flow — add a public extension to a flow and configure it.
- Browse the Awell Marketplace — see which integrations already exist.
- Build a private extension — connect an internal app with the extension SDK/API.