Since 2002, we have been closely monitoring what has been happening with EHR implementation. After 2010, when The Affordable Care Act brought the means to integrate new technologies to the entire healthcare ecosystem, we have been up to our elbows in EHR integration. With 2020 and the need for Telehealth, EHR integration has really been on everybody’s radar and the issues we had before are that much more urgent today.
Depending on the number of EHRs, complexity of the health system, and data models needed (among other variables) we propose different custom-made integration setups.
The optimal EHR integration strategy depends on two main factors:
- Desired depth of integration
- Desired width of integration
Other important factors to consider include:
- Is the integration synchronous or asynchronous
- Volumes of data to be processed
- Formats of input/output data (HL7, FHIR, proprietary…)
- What are other external systems/APIs that need to be integrated