How to Read a Patient's Procedure and Surgical History with

Your product can read the procedures a patient has had (surgeries, endoscopies, biopsies, in-office procedures) from AdvancedMD, athenahealth, CharmHealth, Epic, MEDITECH, NextGen Healthcare, Oracle Health, Orion Health, PointClickCare, SMART on FHIR, TruBridge and Veradigm through one connection and one method call (as of 24 October 2026).

sdk.healthcare.listHealthcareProcedures returns the same Procedure object on all twelve, linked to the visit, the clinicians who performed it and the conditions that justified it. Every request is executed directly against the customer's EHR.

Why procedure history matters

Surgical history shapes almost every downstream decision: pre-operative risk scoring, quality measures (has this patient had a colonoscopy in the last ten years?), care gap outreach, prior authorization, and the patient summary an AI assistant reads before a visit. It's also one of the sections clinicians most often find incomplete when it has to be re-entered by hand.

The EHR holds it as procedure records, coded in CPT or SNOMED CT. Unified.to's Healthcare API returns them as a single Procedure object.

What you are building

A surgical and procedure history section, plus the queries that power care-gap logic.

1. Authorize the customer's EHR and store one connection ID
2. List a patient's procedures
3. Show them on a timeline with who performed them and why
4. Match codes for quality measures and care gaps

List a patient's procedures

import { UnifiedTo } from '@unified-api/typescript-sdk';

const sdk = new UnifiedTo({
  security: { jwt: process.env.UNIFIED_API_KEY },
});

const procedures = await sdk.healthcare.listHealthcareProcedures({
  connectionId,
  patientId,
  limit: 100,
});

On a patient-launch connection, leave out patientId and Unified.to uses the patient who authorized it.

What each field tells you

name is the procedure as the EHR displays it; codes carries the codings (CPT, SNOMED CT, ICD-10-PCS) with their system, so you can match a procedure without parsing its name.

status is PREPARATION, IN_PROGRESS, NOT_DONE, ON_HOLD, STOPPED, COMPLETED, ENTERED_IN_ERROR or UNKNOWN. For history, count COMPLETED; NOT_DONE is a procedure that was planned and didn't happen, which matters for care-gap logic too.

start_at and end_at are when it was performed. Many EHRs record only a start.

practitioner_ids are the clinicians who performed it, location_id where, and encounter_id the visit. All reference objects in the same API.

condition_ids and reasons explain why: condition_ids point at Condition records in the patient's problem list, and reasons hold codings when the reason wasn't recorded as a condition.

body_sites holds the anatomical location, for example which knee.

Use codes for quality measures

const CPT = 'http://www.ama-assn.org/go/cpt';
const COLONOSCOPY = ['45378', '45380', '45385'];

const lastColonoscopy = procedures
  .filter((p) => p.status === 'COMPLETED')
  .filter((p) => p.codes?.some((c) => c.system === CPT && COLONOSCOPY.includes(c.code ?? '')))
  .map((p) => p.start_at)
  .sort()
  .at(-1);

Match on system and code together; the same number can mean different things in different code systems.

Handling coverage that varies by EHR

Check support before you scope on the Supported Integrations page. On Orion Health, procedures can be listed but not fetched one by one (as of 24 October 2026).

Treat 501 as information, not failure. An empty list means no procedures are recorded; a 501 means the EHR doesn't expose them.

Procedures are read-only through the unified object.

Stay current

On Oracle Health, SMART on FHIR, TruBridge and Veradigm (as of 24 October 2026), updatedGte returns only procedures changed since a timestamp, and [virtual webhooks](/blog/what_are_virtual_webhooks_how_they_differ_from_sync_based_webhooks) for healthcare_procedure deliver changes. On the others, read on a schedule or before each visit.

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Frequently asked questions

Does this include procedures done at other organizations?

It includes what the customer's EHR has recorded, which often includes outside procedures entered as history. Their practitioner_ids may be empty because the performer isn't in that EHR.

Where are the operative notes?

Operative and procedure notes are clinical documents. List them with listHealthcareDocuments and type: 'PROCEDURE_NOTE', and join on encounter_id.