Interfacing

The Bridges Interface Development Toolkit facilitates interface maintenance with a real-time interface monitor, a usage statistics utility, an error logging utility, and an interactive error-analysis report. Bridges enables developers to create a variety of message formats, providing data mapping capabilities and flexible data formatting. Bridges includes templates for HL7, ANSI X12, and XML standards and can also be used to support interface transactions in a fixed format or other non-standard data formats.

Voice recognition

Hyperspace, Epic's graphical user interface, is compatible with third-party voice recognition applications. Voice recognition allows users to convert voice input directly into progress notes or other text entries.

Patient monitoring devices

Epic has the ability to connect to a wide range of patient monitoring devices. Multiple patient monitoring devices can be downloaded into flowsheets rather than charting manually. Once in the Epic system, data from devices can be graphed, reported on, and monitored for trends, improving overall care delivery. Epic offers a standard HL7 Device Formatted Medical Device Interface that can be used for receiving discrete alphanumeric data from monitoring systems. Most major manufacturers already have an option for HL7 interfacing, alleviating the need for a third-party middleware solution.

CCOW compatibility

Epic supports the Clinical Context Object Workgroup standard for coordination of different applications. Working in conjunction with third-party context management software, the Epic user interface can accept the current user, patient and encounter contexts for a session from a non-Epic application, so the user does not need to re-enter this information. Similarly, Epic's interface can transmit the user, patient and encounter contexts to other applications.