If you’ve been to the doctor’s office recently and seen your provider taking notes on a computer, there’s a good chance they are logging notes into Epic. Epic is a leading electronic health record (EHR) software system that aids healthcare providers in managing and exchanging patient information. Many organizations seek to enhance healthcare websites by providing providers and patients with a more holistic user experience.
Benefits of Epic Integration
One of the most impactful ways to achieve this unified experience is by creating an online presence integrating Epic with your public-facing Drupal or WordPress website. Epic data exchange can facilitate all aspects of a patient’s care, including:
- Giving individual patients easy, real-time access to their medical records
- Enhancing the patient experience with accessible, intuitive presentation of their information
- Providing individual patient information that facilitates clinical decision support for providers alongside relevant informational and reference content
Epic integration lets you facilitate these activities and much more from a single, unified location. Leveraging Epic’s interoperability allows you to work with the rich, full-featured editorial experience you’ve come to love in your Drupal or WordPress site alongside the power of your Epic EHR implementation.
Integrating Epic with Drupal or WordPress CMS
Epic offers a robust set of HL7® FHIR® compliant APIs that developers can use to create custom applications for your needs. There’s no suitable “one size fits all” solution for Epic interoperability. Regardless of your CMS, you’ll want to build a solution tailored to your needs.
Security and compliance are paramount when interacting with your patient data. When working with Epic’s APIs, a partially decoupled architecture can protect your patient data while still leveraging the ease of use of a CMS for the rest of your on-site content.
Consider an entirely headless approach to maximize the security and performance of patient and site data. A headless approach is a website with the backend decoupled from the frontend. The frontend is written with javascript like ReactJS, or VueJS. The content of a headless site typically comes from API’s. This means there is no database like we see in Drupal or WordPress. Your site-data, patient-data, and front-end will all live in different places.
You can learn more about WordPress and Headless in our blog post.
While a headless website gives you modern flexibility and separates the end-user experience from your sensitive data stores, it comes with technical complexities and tradeoffs. It may only be suitable for some organizations:
- organizations with multiple API integrations, including site-content that is centralized and dispersed to multiple services or apps,
- those that have the extensive monthly budgets, bandwidth, and expertise to maintain a decoupled system, and
- organizations that require the highest security and performance possible may wish to consider a completely headless solution.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach. The below Pros and Cons list is an attempt to provide a quick overview to help you make an informed decision.
PRO
CON
CMS only
PRO
- Site data is easily updatable
- Skilled developers and agencies are plentiful
- Ease of use
- Templating and flexibility in content creation
- Lower initial cost
CON
- Patient data could be stored in the database
- Only as flexible as the content management system allows
- Only as performant as the CMS will allow for with the coupled front and backend.
- The site itself is as secure as the CMS and the hosting provider.
Semi Decoupled site
PRO
- Site data is easily updatable
- Patient data is very secure
- Templating and flexibility in content creation
- Specially skilled developers are required
- Maintainability cost is lower
CON
- The site itself is as secure as the CMS and the hosting provider
- The site itself is as performant as the CMS and the hosting provider.
Entirely Headless Site
PRO
- Patient data is very secure
- Highly performant
- Highly secure
- Highly flexible
- Omnichannel
- Adaptable
CON
- Site data is updatable but may require additional caching to be cleared
- Specially skilled developers are required
- May require multiple systems and personnel to publish a single update
- Highest initial cost
- Most content may be created with raw inputs and APIs
Conclusion
Integrating Epic with WordPress and Drupal empowers healthcare organizations to improve patient engagement, streamline clinical operations, and ensure compliance with regulatory standards. Whether using WordPress for its user-friendly interface or Drupal for its scalability and customization capabilities, healthcare providers can leverage Epic’s EHR functionalities to optimize the patient experience and create better health outcomes.