Polling vs. webhooks

There are two ways to learn about changes in Thea.

	Webhooks	Polling with updated_since
Latency	Seconds	Your polling interval
Rate-limit cost	None	One request per page, per interval
Needs a public HTTPS endpoint	Yes	No
Can miss changes	Yes, if your endpoint is down for over 24 hours	No

Recommended: both

1. Subscribe to webhooks for the events your product reacts to, and fetch the resource when one arrives.
2. Run a periodic sync with updated_since (hourly or nightly) to reconcile anything a webhook didn’t deliver, for example after an outage on your side.

Because both paths fetch the current resource and upsert by id, it doesn’t matter which one sees a change first.

Polling only

If you can’t receive webhooks (for example, inside a hospital network with no inbound access), poll:

• For each connected practice, GET /cases?updated_since=<last checkpoint> with its practice key every 1–5 minutes.
• Fetch GET /cases/{case_id}/messages only for cases whose updated_at changed.

At a one-minute interval, that’s well inside the rate limits for most practices. See Pagination for a sync loop.