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EHR integration:
a complete overview & real-world examples
May 22, 2025
EHR integration facilitates smooth and secure data exchange between electronic health records systems and other software and devices within and outside a healthcare organization, enabling care teams to get comprehensive and up-to-date patient data for informed decision-making.
An expert provider of EHR solutions, Itransition delivers end-to-end EHR integration services to help healthcare organizations optimize administrative workflows, boost staff productivity, improve quality of care, and elevate patient experiences.
Benefits of EHR integration
Seamless EHR integration with other healthcare systems allows organizations to create an interoperable health system for care management, which brings multiple benefits if properly executed.
Increased productivity
By getting all patient records and information about activities like appointments, lab results, and medication prescriptions in one place, medical professionals significantly save time on inputting health information manually and switching from one system to another.
Healthcare interoperability
EHR integration facilitates data coordination and exchange among healthcare systems, promoting transparency between departments, healthcare organizations, and partners.
Better clinical decisions
By enabling a full view of a patient's condition through data integration, integrated EHR systems and digital health tools help clinicians make more accurate decisions, develop personalized, more impactful treatment plans, and improve care delivery.
Cost savings
Automated information exchange between EHR and other medical software eliminates manual input errors, which reduces healthcare organizations’ costs associated with erroneous decisions like prescribing unnecessary procedures or making wrong diagnoses.
Enhance care delivery with a fully integrated EHR system
EHR integration roadmap
1
Discovery
Gathering requirements for EHR integration
Evaluating the current IT infrastructure
Deciding on the integration tech stack
2
Planning
Creating an EHR integration project plan
Defining project timelines, deliverables, budget, and acceptance criteria
3
Design
Defining communication protocols
Setting up data exchange standards and data storage formats
Establishing applicable security and governance standards and policies
4
Implementation
Developing custom connectors or setting up ready-made integration solutions
Integrating the EHR software with the intended healthcare system
5
Testing & launch
Running performance, security, user acceptance, and compatibility tests
Fixing detected issues
Implementing the integration solution to the production environment
Providing project documentation and end users training
6
Support
Monitoring the integration’s stability and performance
Resolving emerging issues
Telemedicine-ready EHR
Developing a full-scale EHR solution with telemedicine functionality, we integrated it with platforms for natural language processing and voice and handwriting recognition, libraries for medical term recognition to streamline encounter documentation for clinical specialists, and a portal for telehealth visits management.
1,000
therapy orders created monthly
Oncology treatment platform
Itransition’s team engineered a solution comprising three interconnected modules that automates medical information collection and treatment order management. We integrated the solution with EHR software, a LIMS system, and laboratory and insurance service providers’ solutions, establishing communication between the systems through HL7 standards.
Asthma monitoring software
Itransition’s experts delivered a suite of software solutions that work in conjunction with asthma monitoring devices and help patients self-manage this condition. The software captures device readings and connects with external services and a data exchange channel for integrating with an EHR solution, providing this information to both patients and clinicians.
Common EHR integration challenges & solutions
Connecting EHR with standalone systems is associated with some possible technical and administrative roadblocks that you need to know how to address properly.
Challenge | Solution | |
|---|---|---|
High upfront costs |
Many healthcare managers hesitate to start an EHR integration project due to the excessive costs it can
bring.
| Carefully choose your implementation partner, giving preference to companies that offer flexible engagement options and pricing models to meet your budget and needs. Develop and implement EHR integrations in phases, following the incremental approach and prioritizing the most crucial ones. Additionally, pick cloud-based solutions, such as iPaaS, with tiered packages to lower the initial investments, or open-source integration systems with no licensing fees and great customization freedom. |
Technical limitations |
Some healthcare organizations can find that their outdated legacy systems are difficult to integrate due
to the lack of APIs or standardized interfaces and the obsolete technologies they are built with.
| To integrate systems delivered by different vendors and lacking in-built connectors, developing a custom integration solution that addresses the restrictions of the existing software is the best solution. |
Lack of data standardization |
EHR and healthcare systems can contain data of inconsistent formats, coding, or terminology, which hinders
its successful exchange.
| Follow widely accepted HL7 and FHIR protocols when integrating healthcare software to ensure consistent data formats and terminologies across systems. This helps achieve EHR interoperability and lays the groundwork for easier EHR integration with more tools in the future. |
Privacy & security risks |
The creation of a more complicated, interconnected system can create more opportunities for cyberattacks
due to expanded access to sensitive information, an increased number of entry points, and larger data
volumes stored and transmitted.
| Ensure strong data protection with robust security mechanisms, such as granular access controls, data encryption at rest and in transit, and secure data transfer protocols. Moreover, implement integration solutions that are compliant with HIPAA, HITECH, and GDPR. |
Reliance on established workflows |
Personnel can struggle with switching from their established routines (e.g., emailing documents, sending
faxes, or making follow-up calls) to new, automated workflows.
| Develop a comprehensive user onboarding strategy to help the staff adapt to new technologies and clinical workflows. Increase awareness of the need for change, make a team with key stakeholders to promote the change, and conduct personnel training to enhance the efficiency of their software use. |
Ready to integrate EHR with the software of your choice?
Healthcare software to integrate with EHR systems
The following medical solutions are most commonly integrated with EHR software to help medical practitioners from different specialties aggregate and exchange patient data.
Patient portals
Lab management systems
Medical analytics
Telehealth
Hospital management
software
EHR integration
Medical IoT
Financial & insurance
management systems
Healthcare CRM
Pharmacy management
software
Patient portals
Boost patient engagement and keep your patients fully informed about the state of their health by synchronizing their medical data from EHR software to the patient portal.
Lab management systems
Reduce the number of man-made mistakes and accelerate diagnosis and treatment by allowing an uninterrupted data flow between a laboratory information system and the EHR tool.
Medical analytics
Get a better understanding of a patient's condition, timely spot concerning health trends, determine possible causes, and forecast the course of illnesses by supplying medical analytics solutions with accurate and relevant data from the EHR platform.
Telehealth
Make sure that medical professionals get all of the patient’s details during a teleconsultation and can upload their examination notes directly into the EHR solution from the telehealth platform.
Hospital management software
Synchronize the appointments and patients’ data from the EHR solution with task and resource management systems and efficiently distribute tasks and resources at the point of care.
Medical IoT
Upload health metrics and real-time readings from remote monitoring devices straight into EHR software. Send out alerts and notifications to patients’ and doctors’ devices in case of unusual results or pattern changes.
Financial & insurance management systems
Accelerate patient eligibility verification, claim management, and service billing and reimbursement by integrating EHR software and medical insurance management and billing solutions.
Healthcare CRM
Ensure a more personalized approach to patient care with CRM and EHR software integration, consolidating medical and non-medical patient data to understand patient needs and preferences, tailor patient communications, and develop targeted service offerings.
Pharmacy management software
Give pharmacies access to patient information for treatment, payment, and health care operations purposes to speed up prescription fulfillment, eliminate dosage errors, and enable pharmacists to recommend suitable medication alternatives.
Popular EHR integration approaches
Direct (point-to-point) integration
This method involves establishing direct connections between systems using pre-built or custom-built integration solutions. This approach is frequently used for small-scale integration projects but can be unsuitable for connecting larger networks of apps and processes.
Enterprise service bus
Within this integration approach, data exchange between different EHRs, legacy systems, and other software is handled by a centralized solution, an enterprise service bus (ESB), that receives and transforms data and routes messages to target systems. By reducing the number of connections, this method provides greater flexibility, scalability, and cost-saving opportunities in the long run.
Cloud-based integration (iPaaS)
This integration method involves using cloud-based integration tools to connect cloud and on-premises systems without installing or managing dedicated hardware or middleware. iPaaS systems provide a centralized dashboard to manage and monitor created integrations, pre-built connectors, and low-code or no-code templates for users to establish connections between EHR and other software.
Looking for an experienced EHR integration provider?
EHR integration services from Itransition
Consulting
Itransition’s experts help you decide on the most suitable EHR integration option and tech stack, creating a comprehensive project plan tailored to your needs and providing support throughout the whole integration journey. We also guide you on ensuring the regulatory compliance of integrated solutions.
Integration
We help you build a coherent, connected healthcare ecosystem by integrating EHRs with existing medical and business software, as well as third-party applications if necessary. Our experts choose and implement a suitable API or middleware or develop a custom integration solution and ensure that the connection is secure and compliant with data security regulations.
Support & maintenance
Our experts monitor and maintain the implemented integrations to ensure their proper functioning and ability to meet the organization’s evolving requirements. We render broad-range support services from basic troubleshooting to optimizing integration performance and strengthening the integration security on demand.
FAQs
EHR integration enables automated data exchange between EHR software and different healthcare systems and devices to provide access to complete patient data for multiple stakeholders, reduce administrative burden, and improve the efficiency of patient care.
Automated data exchange between EHR and other healthcare systems contributes to better and easier data access for care providers of varied specialities or even from different institutions. This way, integrated EHR solutions help clinicians confidently make informed decisions, reduce errors and unnecessary expenses, and improve patient outcomes.
Common EHR integration best practices include:
- Interviewing representatives of different departments about their data exchange problems and expectations and using this information during project planning
- Prioritizing integration solutions aligned with recognized healthcare standards
- Ensuring robust integration security by implementing corresponding mechanisms and conducting security audits before integration roll-out
The integration project’s cost depends on the EHR system in question and the solutions it’s integrated with, the company’s infrastructure, the number and complexity of the integrations, and other factors, so each case needs to be assessed individually. You can reach out to our experts to define your project scope and estimate a ballpark cost.
Our experts work with electronic medical records software from leading EHR vendors, including Epic, Oracle Health (formerly Cerner), and AthenaHealth. Additionally, we customize ready-made solutions and build custom EHR systems entirely from scratch.
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