How to Integrate your Healthcare App with Epic EHR

Many physicians use tools for digitizing their workflow like telehealth apps, Customer Relationship Management systems, appointment scheduling APIs, etc. However, it might be messy to have all these tools separated and outside of a single platform.

Plus, working with medical information requires a lot of caution in terms of patient data privacy. So, making sure that each one of your tools is compliant with regulations and managing them all at once is quite a challenge.

This article’s key figure — Epic Software — is an EHR, for example. In addition to integration in a multi-vendor EHR system, the company offers templates for different medical forms like those required by insurance companies or pharmacies, features for lab management, etc. They also have functionality that allows clinics to digitize administrative and managerial processes:

• Scheduling.
• Prescribing.
• Billing.
• Managing document flow (including the possibility to extract data).
• Reporting & others.

So, if you’re ready to invest somewhat more but get the benefits of fully-fledged patient management, EHR might be your choice. But if your needs are more about locally storing patient information and you don’t require to get info from the outside of your clinic, EMR might work for you as well.

To be fair, finding an EMR provider is much more difficult since most companies offer EMR functionality within their EHR offers. However, it’s always an option to talk to a provider of your choice and ask them if they have any opportunities to provide you with limited functionality!

🤖 Epic EHR Integration into your Health App

In this section, we’ll go through the steps you need to take so as to implement the Epic EHR. Even though we talk about Epic integration, the information here would be applicable to most of the EHR/EMR systems on the market that any vendor of health systems.

It’s important to mention that Epic uses FHIR, which is a set of standards, formats, and data elements vendors should use when exchanging medical records. It means that any healthcare professional or clinic supporting FHIR can be connected with each other and perform data exchange.

Now, let’s get back to the integration process. The integration happens via using Epic API. All information regarding Epic EHR API specifications and documentation can be found here. There you’ll find technical information that can be used by your development team.

The administrative part of the integration itself isn’t that complex. To begin with, we recommend checking Epic’s Support page. You can find multiple useful links and contact information there. Your next step to Epic integration would be creating an account on the FHIR page.

In the following step, you should check if all endpoints are functioning. Endpoints are links that can be used to communicate (send requests) with the server (in our case, Epic API). These links can be found in API Specifications. To “check” simply means sending a request to the server using the given link and making sure it does what it’s supposed to do.

After that, you can contact Epic to discuss all the details and start the technical part of the integration. You can do it with the help of your own in-house development team or outsource it to a Tech Partner.

Apart from an actual integration, you can integrate Epic into your workflow and use its functionality in several ways:

Surely, your Tech Stack might differ from what we list here depending on your use case. Here are the possible options:

• Calendar & Booking: Microsoft Bookings, Calendly, Picktime.
• Patient Interviewing & Support: IMH, Gyant.
• Medical History Analyzing: Averbis, Amazon Comprehend Medical.

There are also a lot of tools for remote patient monitoring; and you can implement it into working with patients with almost any medical condition from Asthma (Digihaler) to Diabetes (Medtronic). Most of the devices are controlled by a dedicated health app.

We’ve recently posted an article dedicated to IoT devices that businesses in the healthcare industry can implement into their workflows or any health app. We’ve talked about such general use cases as patients’ private usage, IoT for physicians, any medical institution or clinic, and health insurance companies: