The API implementation process may be slow, but its role in healthcare is forecasted to increase, allowing the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and other innovations.

Essential Integrations

There are hundreds of EMR integrations with the potential to add value to your healthcare practice. There’s no “one shoe fits all” solution, and your considerations should be based on your unique practice needs. Still, we have listed a few EMR integrations that practices should consider opting for, regardless of their size or specialty.

Telehealth

As remote patient care is exploding in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, providers are required to provide satisfactory virtual care without disrupting their clinical workflow. The idea is to make telehealth visits part of their existing workflow; integrating telehealth and EMR platforms might be the solution.

A telehealth EMR integration provides practitioners an end-to-end bidirectional interface to pass patient data back and forth between systems. Providers can launch video sessions directly from their existing EMR while utilizing and entering patient information in a heartbeat.

Benefits

• Reduces clinical burden by reducing steps for documentation and patient interaction.
• Automates data entry; entering patient details only once eliminates duplication and error.
• Streamlines data collection that can be used for reporting and analytics.
• Enhances patient outcomes by providing relevant patient history like allergies and conditions.
• Enables seeing more patients in a day.
• Practitioners can provide traditional care experience conveniently.
• Diagnoses, prescriptions, medication and notes are stored and made available instantly.

Laboratory Information System

The manual process of generating and receiving lab orders is time-consuming and error-prone. It disrupts the crucial flow of clinical data, often causing discrepancies and incomplete records. An EMR integration with LIS streamlines the whole process, from order generation to reception.

Benefits

• Providers can quickly access and review lab results.
• A faster uninterrupted flow of data leads to faster diagnosis and treatment.
• Reduces the risk of errors.
• Increases patient safety with prompt alerts for unusual results.
• Enables ease of code and billing validation.

Clinical Trial Management System

CTMS are utilized by biotech and pharmaceutical organizations to streamline operational data management in clinical trials and research. Although EMR and CTMS are separate systems meant to serve different functions, they truly complement each other, especially when it comes to patient safety.

Physicians must be informed of a patient’s clinical trial enrollment details, including whether they are currently enrolled in one. Similarly, clinical trial physicians need to know the patient’s medical history and treatment to maximize patient safety.

Benefits

• Enhances patient care and safety with holistic access to accurate patient records.
• Reduces billing errors and compliance issues.

Compare Top EMR Software Leaders

Medical Device Integration (MDI)

Many practices utilize a large number of biomedical devices at the point of care. ORs and ICUs use devices like monitors, smart beds, anesthesia carts, finger cuffs and ventilators to keep track of vital signs such as blood pressure, heart rate and oxygen saturation. These devices generate a huge amount of data that are leveraged in clinical decision processes and regulatory requirements.

An MDI automates data transcription by integrating these medical devices to the EMR system. A vendor-agnostic MDI can connect your biomedical devices to a variety of EMR solutions, bringing modern healthcare practices closer towards complete interoperability.

Benefits

• Eliminates the time-consuming process of recording and inputting readings manually into the EMR.
• Bypassing transcription errors increases data accuracy.
• Enables innovations like the Internet of Medical Things and remote tracking and management of patients.
• Collects huge volume of data of choice for practice reporting and regulatory compliance requirements.

MDI Integration Process

• Evaluate which devices can be integrated seamlessly. Older devices might not be integrable.
• Determine data parameters required for clinical decision processes. Your devices at the point of care may generate numerous parameters of data; assess which ones are necessary. Your MDI vendor should provide consultation regarding this.
• Standardize data measurements. Your MDI should convert data into the units of measurement used by your EMR.
• Choose the best data source for devices monitoring the same patient vital signs.
• The MDI and EMR vendors need to coordinate during the implementation process.

For best results, make sure that the offered product is compatible, scalable, meets device connectivity specifications and hardware requirements at the point of contact. Your EMR should be capable of uninterrupted data transportation at standard rates.

Medical Billing

Even though many EMR systems incorporate billing functionality, EMR and medical billing software are fundamentally different. While EMR focuses on patient care, medical billing is entirely focused on managing your revenue cycle. Integrating with a specialized billing software might maximize reimbursement and the bottom line for your practice.

Depending on your practice needs, opt for single-vendor integrated packages or vendor-agnostic systems. Vendor-agnostic billing systems might allow you to provide a more personalized billing solution for your practice. Check out our medical billing software leaderboard and buyer’s guide before choosing a solution.

Benefits

• Aggregate patient charting and billing workflows to create a central repository of comprehensive data with specialized features.
• Increase patient satisfaction by offering them multiple payment methods, online payment and scheduling from a single interface.
• Improve coding with easy transmission of patient records into the billing system, which reduces coding errors and claim rejections.
• Maximize reimbursement by consolidating eligibility verification, comprehensive patient records, specialized claims management and clearinghouse solutions.

Success Strategies

EMR integrations might improve patient outcomes and operational efficiency significantly, but integrating disparate systems into your primary EMR is quite an overwhelming task. Improper implementation can lead to data errors, even disrupting clinical workflows.

According to Travis Good, CEO of Catalyze, “EHR integration tends to be synonymous with message types, but if you’ve completed an integration with an EHR, you realize that it is much more of a process. It’s a journey. Message types, integration engines, and web services are one step in this process. Combining messages with programmed logic, security, and project management are just as essential to getting to the finish line of an integration.”

The SelectHub analyst team has curated a list of key success strategies to aid in the EMR integration process. However large or complex your integration project is, you can employ these strategies for a smooth implementation and high end-user satisfaction.

Effective Communication

We strongly recommend consulting your clinicians and anyone within the organization likely to be using the integrated solutions at every step of the implementation process. How will they benefit from using the integration? What do they expect from it? Understanding their workflow helps decision-makers better plan their integration strategy and enables proper coordination between the different stakeholders – clinicians, staff, IT and vendors.

Effective and consistent communication throughout your organization also ensures that everyone is on the same page regarding status, issues and educational materials. Shift changes, meetings and ticket processing should be optimized to ensure that questions are answered promptly. During the implementation process, effective scheduling with common directives and optimized shifts can prevent staff burnout and ensure that enough super users are available 24/7.

A decisive orientation process ensures that your entire practice is made aware of the integration scope, objectives and strategy. Transparency between integration resources and organizational staff is a requisite.

Identify Implementation Goals

Integration projects, especially bigger ones, can quickly get out of hand without a well-planned integration strategy. Thus, a crucial step to a successful EMR integration is to define a proper implementation strategy, including the scope of integration, at the inception of the project. The scope also includes a completed integrated workflow, organization requirements, data migration needs, cost of ownership, sites and involved stakeholders.

After assigning a team and performing a thorough evaluation and consultation with your clinicians, conduct a rigorous assessment to determine: Why does your practice need to implement an EMR integration? What value does it bring to the table? Is your practice ready for implementation? The analysis should also find gaps in your practice operations and help you find the parameters for developing goals for your project. Properly assign roles, including an executive manager and integration, network and security leads to ensure a smooth integration process.

Compare Top EMR Software Leaders

Early Vendor Engagement

Once you have a decent comprehension of the scope of your project and what your business is setting out to accomplish with your EMR integration, you should engage and coordinate with your vendor early in the project. It’s vital to establish an agreement on the integration scope at project inception, with formal contracts and statements of work. Ask your vendor about implementation support, learning curves, data backups and potential challenges. You should also align vendor, resourcing and organizational timetables.

Getting done with the definition of scope, role assignment and early vendor coordination as soon as possible paves the way to a smooth integration process. It also helps you get started with time-intensive legal reviews of contracts and statements of work (SOWs).

Exhaustive scrutiny has become imperative after the COVID-19 pandemic. Your vendor resources must go through a thorough onboarding process, including COVID tests, drug screening, vaccination status and background verification. Your vendor should ensure compliance and provide all necessary data, including drill data and safety precautions.

Meticulous Testing Plan

Since test plans are usually defined differently by different vendors, all parties involved should have a shared comprehension of each test phase, timelines and degree of description. Various terms are associated with different test phases:

• Connectivity Test: After sample messages are extracted from the clinical solutions, a secure VPN tunnel is established, delivering messages through the tunnel to test connectivity. Analysts review the results and perform initial troubleshooting.
• Functional Test: Each message category is reviewed thoroughly to ensure proper mapping between the EMR interface and vendor models.
• Integrated Tests: These are done in multiple phases with different scenarios between health systems and APIs to detect and fix issues.
• Other: commonly conducted testing phases include unit tests, user acceptance tests, stress tests, volume tests, field-specific tests, mapped record tests, small and large scale tests.

Phases may differ for each party, but proper definitions and descriptions are crucial for a shared understanding of the project. Get a clear understanding of which resources are being engaged during testing, when the tests are conducted and how much time is required.

Define and Review Clinical and Functional Requirements

Without a clear comprehension of your clinical and business operations, resources often end up delivering a solution that turns out to be inadequate for different stakeholders. Thus, a shared understanding between and the engagement of key stakeholders is necessary to incorporate functional, clinical, business and technical workflows into the integration. Clinicians, tech teams and other users should review and approve its functionality.

Even with seamless coordination, defining clinical and functional requirements for your implementation can seem daunting and time-consuming. Take a look at our free requirements template to jumpstart this process.

Configuring Systems with Organization Security Framework

Security should be a priority whenever a new system or device is added to your organization workflow, lest a data breach occurs. User access controls and authentication methods are effective means to retain control of your data and prevent costly infringements. Communicate with your vendor to ensure that the access controls and authentication methods are transmitted to the new system and encryption models are in line with your existing security framework.

Activation Plan

When it is time to go live, it would be a shared responsibility for internal and external resources to perform data acquisition, data cleaning, data standardization and quality assurance. A step-by-step activation plan should be in place to gradually decrease the role of your external resources and make sure that your staff can sufficiently operate the integrated systems. Devise a cutover plan, check sheets and early evaluations.

Post-Activation Support Protocol

The weeks after any go-live can be pretty challenging. Even with careful planning, things might not go according to plan. Miscommunications, testing and design flaws might move over and accumulate to only materialize post-go-live. You should have a concise plan to resolve inadvertent issues and errors.

Feedback and Optimization

For the first two to three months, track and monitor the EMR integration extensively via analytics reporting. Frequent feedback from all end-users should be collected and reviewed systematically.

During the optimization phase, utilize this feedback to detect gaps as early as possible and employ resources to redesign and incorporate functionality according to your unique business needs.

Compare Top EMR Software Leaders

Conclusion

EMR integration may be a difficult process that can’t be solved with just APIs. But with EMR adoption nearing saturation, EMR integration is the next logical step for healthcare practices to connect the dots between disparate systems. It is crucial for success for both healthcare providers and software vendors.

Bidirectional data flow is necessary, but it’s more than just that. EMR integration is supposed to integrate the clinical workflow, not just the flow of data. This is especially vital when it comes to scalability. Other challenges may also arise, such as: Unique identifiers, data standardization, high costs, privacy and security issues. If you haven’t already, go check out our free requirements template to ease the implementation of EMR/EHR integrations.

Interoperability is a process that all providers have to dip their toes into eventually. Hopefully, the tips provided in this article will give you an edge in overcoming these barriers. An interoperable ecosystem will more than pay for itself. The next few years will witness a significant transformation of the healthcare industry, with interoperability certainly playing a part. Also check out our free customizable comparison report to compare systems based on interoperability or other unique requirements.

Which integration do you think is the most essential for healthcare facilities? What other challenges did you face while implementing an EMR integration? Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments below.