How to connect ZapEHR to Epic EHR

May 11, 2023

The Affordable Care Act brought about many shifts in the dynamics of healthcare for the United States. Combined with the extraordinary leaps in technology over the last decade, ACA initiatives have launched a new generation of electronic health and medical recordkeeping. Though this technology continues to evolve in bigger and better ways, the variety and scope of such software remains immense. The ACA, along with CMS, has also introduced new challenges for healthcare systems, Accountable Care Organizations, Managed Services, and providers. Given the incentives available for quality and efficient population management, it has become almost imperative to capture the entire spectrum of patient care. This type of capture allows for not only greater cohesion and synergy between different providers on the patient’s care team, but also for enhanced reporting and a greater understanding of conditions, procedures, medications, and screenings for every patient in a practice.

One of the greatest challenges, however, remains the interoperability and exchange of information between different EHR platforms and reporting avenues. Continued government initiatives have made this exchange much more feasible, however the right technology is critical to leveraging data management to its fullest potential. The United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) sets a standard for data elements that can conform cross-platform. This standardization, combined with the Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) specification allows uniformity and a level of predictability in data extraction between EHRs, applications, and analytic data stores. When used in conjunction with a fully customizable headless EHR platform, these tools can be enormously powerful and save many hours of data cleansing or normalizing post-intake.

ZapEHR is a revolutionary, developer-centric headless EHR platform that allows for full customization of electronic healthcare applications. Providing not only API and data modeling, ZapEHR offers compliance and cloud infrastructure capabilities in a single source solution for nearly any use case in the healthcare applications market. Let’s take a look at how this technology could help to create a linkage between a custom, nascent healthcare application and one of the nation’s most popular EHRs.

So you want to connect to Epic…

Epic makes up approximately 34% of the market share in EHRs. There are plenty of well-known use cases for data extraction from Epic, but new ideas are brought to fruition on a constant basis as the platform’s capabilities and reach grow. Leveraging USCDI, FHIR, APIs, and a proven headless solution like ZapEHR makes integration seamless. Let’s assume a situation where an obstetrical practice group wishes to create a full-circle medical management application for their patients. Given the complex needs of the patient population, their referral network is expansive and diverse - ranging from cardiologists and endocrinologists to nurse midwives and physical therapists. The practice is not using Epic, but some of their largest referral partners - including the hospital system where most births occur - are. This is an excellent use case for ZapEHR, given the need is provider-facing and would not necessarily require a data push into Epic systems, only a pull and consolidation for their continuous care application.

A few simple steps…

The process to connect the practice group’s application to Epic is simple and straightforward, thanks to interoperability and a headless development environment.

Confirm your data ‘host’ is using Epic (in this example). Coordinate with the practice/hospital’s management as needed.
Create your user account on USCDI.EPIC.COM, this will register you as a data extraction entity.
Allow ZapEHR’s powerful API tools to create a connection to the Epic EHR API interface.
Leverage ZapEHR’s cloud infrastructure capabilities to align FHIR versions and fields between the extract site and your data models.
Configure and customize your ZapEHR cloud-based databases.
Experience seamless integration between an Epic-based practice or hospital and your application.
If desired, you can also register as an application developer with Epic’s App Orchard. This will allow not only autonomous interaction with the Epic API, but additional data extraction from Epic Hyperspace!