question Re: Epic Help Button Integration in Healthcare Special Interest Group

Epic Help Button Integration

Paul Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2020 13:46:32 GMT

I know this question was asked a year ago, but I thought I would ask again to see if there is any update.

We have our ServiceNow go-live in 3 days and our Epic go-live in June 2021. I've been asked by our CTO to integrate the Epic Help button with SN to create an incident. We've been told by other organizations this has helped reduce roll-out times for Epic. I've been told by SN for a year they are coming out with an offering for it, but I simply can't wait for whenever that might happen.

If you've done this integration I'd love to talk to you about how you accomplished it. This is one of the first items on our roadmap post SN go-live.

Paul

Re: Epic Help Button Integration

Bruce Hadley — Fri, 08 May 2020 14:21:39 GMT

Hi Paul,

I can relate what we at Parkland hospital have researched. We have had Epic since 1999 and ServiceNow since 2016.

There are several corporate issues around the integration between ServiceNow and Epic. As I understand it most of this customization needs to happen inside of Epic. They send out an API call to ServiceNow with details around the issue. In talking with our ServiceNow reps, Epic and ServiceNow continue to work toward an OOTB solution but they haven't given us any release dates.

Parkland is still awaiting that OOTB solution but some other hospitals, like Children's here in Dallas, can customized Epic so that issues are sent from a Epic Help button straight to the team that supports that page in Epic. form my understanding their deployment had no changes in ServiceNow at all, just to provide a web services account. If you have programming resources for Epic, I might be able to connect you with Childrens here to help them with the Epic coding.

Re: Epic Help Button Integration

Drew Koerner — Fri, 08 May 2020 15:01:05 GMT

Hi Paul,

Just to catch you up on your current options. We recently hired a healthcare general manager as well as a product manager and engineering team dedicated to healthcare products. They are getting up to speed on what we will build short and long term. We've brought all of the current Epic integrations including the help button to the front of the list. This will take some time though.

Also, we went through an the process last year to standardize how the button will be built with a customer in Wisconsin. The path will be to leverage AppOrchard and the create of a Smart on FHIR secure URL to pass through 7-8 variables from the hyperspace client directly into ServiceNow. Most of the work is actually on the ServiceNow side by design in order to keep the effort light on the Epic side. Epic is aware of this path and is supportive of the way forward including eventually publishing instructions on UserWeb.

As far as your current options, while we look to build this out, we have enabled a few partners based on this model. I'm also happy to jump on a call and walk you through some of the details in order to do this yourself. It's a fairly simple process that many have chosen to take on while we build the OOTB solution.

Attached is a screen shot of the prototype we have in progress. Feel free to reach out to me directly.

Drew

Drew Koerner

Healthcare CTO

drew.koerner@servicenow.com

Re: Epic Help Button Integration

Community Alums — Fri, 08 May 2020 15:52:07 GMT

Hi Paul,

I have worked with the Get Help function by having them send a notification to the ServiceNow Instance and then setting up an Inbound email action. From what I recall, there wasn't much options aside from email for the Get Help at the time we did that.

I have however also worked on setting up a SOAP integration with Epic to setup users for Haiku/Canto from a ServiceNow catalog item by making a SOAP call to Epic.

Matt Hedtke

mhedtke@aeritae.com

Re: Epic Help Button Integration

Paul Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2020 18:41:51 GMT

Thank you for the information! I did meet with JP from Children's last year (well before we were ready to start thinking about it this). If you have another resource there I'd like to discuss what they've done - I hate to keep bugging JP.

Re: Epic Help Button Integration

Paul Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2020 18:48:27 GMT

Drew, many of us in the Healthcare arena applaud this news! To see SN dedicate a team to developing for our environments certainly makes me feel better. I look forward to hearing more about the roadmap you all are building.

Re: Epic Help Button Integration

Paul Glenn — Fri, 08 May 2020 18:54:35 GMT

Matt, the inbound action is what I've seen others do in the examples I've found. Louie Gomez discussed it in the thread from last year. SOAP is certainly more desirable if possible. My main issue is I know zero about the Epic platform and just don't know what they allow.

Paul

Re: Epic Help Button Integration

michaelslabodni — Fri, 08 May 2020 21:14:43 GMT

This is a really great use case.

From what Drew described we have a customer in Wisconsin that's working towards creating a solution that can then be shared to the community. The architecture includes taking advantage of Epic's ability to launch a frame that can then call a ServiceNow Service Portal with information for the clinical staff. As part of the solution it includes passing data from Epic into ServiceNow to be captured. As we want to ensure there aren't any HIPAA violations the architecture includes making it configurable to be specific as to what session information is sent over (clinician, view, workstation ID, etc.), and then that information itself can also be encrypted to ensure security. The ultimate idea that the customer wants to get to is to capture enough information from the session that the clinician doesn't have to add in details, especially when it comes to wanting to spend time treating patients and not describing IT issues. Also, it would give a portal within Epic for a clinician to interact with IT to check statuses, use virtual agent, etc. As most of the configuration would be on the Service Portal side, the customer is looking to take advantage of ServiceNow's flexibility to adjust the portal for their own needs.

The really comes to be two components - part of Epic to be configured to send the data, and the ServiceNow part to make that configurable within the portal. If you do reach out to Drew I'm sure he'll include me so we can demonstrate how it functions on our side to provide a configurable and secure method of integrating the systems.

Cheers,

Michael Slabodnick

michael.slabodnick@servicenow.com

Re: Epic Help Button Integration

michaelslabodni — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 11:39:24 GMT

To give a brief update - the previously mentioned customer has scheduled to build their integration near the mid/end of August. Things got pushed back due to COVID but they're now back on track to move forward. Very exciting!

Re: Epic Help Button Integration

ABSG-001 — Sun, 20 Sep 2020 12:29:58 GMT

Beautiful! Thanks for the update @michaelslabodnick

Re: Epic Help Button Integration

Bcrant — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 18:50:47 GMT

Is there a monetary cost associated with this integration?

Re: Epic Help Button Integration

Timothy F1 — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 16:10:55 GMT

I've read the document on the store app for this, and the ServiceNow side is pretty straightforward. Do you have instructions for the Epic side?

Re: Epic Help Button Integration

Ashish Pagare — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 23:24:30 GMT

@michaelslabodnick @Drew Koerner Could you please share more details/updates on the Epic and ServiceNow integration that you mentioned above in your post regarding Epic Help button integration?

Re: Epic Help Button Integration

Jeff Heffner — Fri, 07 May 2021 20:40:00 GMT

I realize this is a year later but we're looking to do this now and running into roadblocks.

Drew,

Do you know if there is currently any way to allow connections from Epic as a trusted source without a true user login? Something like a certificate-based key exchange where Epic passes the Epic user sign-on or a generic service account embedded in the link used to authenticate the user? We do not want our users to have to login as themselves to access Service Now. Is this even possible now? Our vendor is telling us it isn't possible but without it I'm not sure we can move forward with this integration.

Thanks,

Jeff Heffner

jheffner@ochsner.org

Re: Epic Help Button Integration

AnttiP — Thu, 27 May 2021 09:28:52 GMT

@michaelslabodnick would you have any update on this?

We'd like to hear your knowledge especially on how you integrated the EMR Help from Epic to SNC, especially from the users' authentication point of view.

Re: Epic Help Button Integration

Jeff Kondas — Sun, 22 Oct 2023 22:54:11 GMT

Thank you!