The key difference between this operation and simply searching the encounter compartment is that it frees the client from needing to determine what it could or should ask for, particularly with regard to included resources.

It is assumed that the server has identified and secured the context appropriately, and can either associate the authorization context with a single encounter, or determine whether the context has the rights to the nominated encounter, if there is one, or can determine an appropriate list of encouners to provide data for from the context of the request. If there is no nominated encounter (GET /[base]/Encounter/$everything) and the context is not associated with a single encounter record, the actual list of encounters is all encounters that the user associated with the request has access to. In such cases, the server may choose to return an error rather than all the records. Specifying the relationship between the context, a user and encounter records is outside the scope of this specification (though see The SMART App Launch Implementation Guide).

When this operation is used to access multiple encounter records at once, the return bundle could be rather a lot of data; servers may choose to require that such requests are made asynchronously, and associated with bulk data formats. Alternatively, clients may choose to page through the result set (or servers may require this). Paging through the results is done the same as for Searching, using the _count parameter, and Bundle links. Unlike searching, there is no inherent user-display order for the $everything operation. Servers MAY consider sorting the returned resources in descending order of last record update.

The _since parameter is provided to support periodic queries to get additional information that has changed about the encounter since the last query. This means that the _since parameter is based on record time. The value of the _since parameter should be set to the time from the server. If using direct response, this is the timestamp in the response header. If using the async interface, this is the transaction timestamp in the json response. Servers should ensure that the timestamps a managed such that the client does not miss any changes. Clients should be able to handle getting the same response more than once in the case that the transaction falls on a time boundary. Clients should ensure that the other query parameters are constant to ensure a coherent set of records when doing periodic queries.