Epic Integration-Pathways to Accessing Data

[Colin Plover]

Hello Helpful Community,

My team and I developed software to help nurses with various operations in hospitals. We are working on integration with Epic now, however, we are limited to what is available in the sandbox. Epic has paused new AppOrchard subscriptions until September. We would like to know how we can develop our code to call or pull patient demographic data associated with specific beds/rooms in the hospital. The software is helpful to nurses by showing them patients in the specific beds/rooms that they are assigned. We know it is possible from people we have spoken with but can not identify how, from the information available in the sandbox, to develop the code to call/pull this information. Do you know how to do this or how we would go about getting the information we need to develop the code to call or pull the information in this way? Is AppOrchard the only way or would a health system partner be able to give us the information necessary?

Thank you!

Best,
Colin

[matt_reinfeldt]

@Colin Plover , have you looked at the Redox integration available with our HCLS solution?  I don't know off the top of my head what you'd be able to do without HCLS-SM installed, but you may be able to reach out to our healthcare industry/product team to figure that out.  Hope that helps!

[matt_reinfeldt]

As a follow-up... You would need to validate that Redox can access that level of data within Epic, as well, of course.  And not everyone is using them.  But, it may be an avenue to explore if at a brick wall with AppOrchard.

[Colin Plover]

Hello Matt,

Thank you for your reply! I really appreciate it. I briefly explored Redox. They wanted $50,000 just for the most basic integration work. The actual costs would have likely been much higher. I am a start up and do not have that kind of funding. I appreciate you sharing this with me though! Always good to know I'm aware of different options.

Best,

Colin

[changeman]

I'm aware of a project or two at our organization that attempt to leverage Rodox for integration, but the info I've seen so far has been quite vague.

With regards to this question:  Is AppOrchard the only way or would a health system partner be able to give us the information necessary?

open.epic is a platform that enables 3rd party integration with Epic without going through App Orchard (now known as App Market).  The challenge, at least in our experience, is that without an Epic customer/health system partner, it could be quite difficult to figure out how some of the APIs work, because the documentation is barebones and you'd need internal knowledge about how some of the data you may be interested in is captured (just because tables and functions exist in the system doesn't mean relevant data is captured reliably).  This is the advantage of App Orchard/Market: you get a resource assigned to assist you with the development process and any issues you might encounter.  There's also the question of access to the system: you either need specific credentials from the health system partner or from patients with data in that system who'd authenticate your access via MyChart token (this is meant to provide patients with access to their data regardless of whether the health system running the instance of Epic wants to participate or not, as required by the Promoting Interoperability regulation).  The latter assumes you know how to get at the data to begin with.

However, even with a willing Epic customer it may still be difficult to figure out some of the quirkier API calls, and we often had to engage Epic resources like our Epic EDI support or Epic's FHIRwalkers group.