Awell provides a couple of options to connect a hospital EMR system with the Awell Care application. The integrations allow to tie creation and updating of individual Patient Care flows to the existing daily clinical practice and avoid the need for additional manual handlings by the Care team.
Hereby is a list of the available options per different scenario in the lifecycle of a clinical care flow.
Patient import
Prior to starting up a care flow for a given patient, the patient needs to exist within the Awell Care application. To create this patient profile, the following four options are available.
1. Option: import via Webservice (Pull)
A clinical user logged in to the Awell Care app, can make a request to import a patient based on the hospital patient ID or the visit number. This triggers a call to the hospital web service over VPN in order to pull the patient demographic details. The clinical user will see the patient details received in the Awell Care app and, after choosing a physician, the clinical user can save the patient in Awell’s database.
Technical requirements:
Hospital has to implement a custom web service that Awell can query with hospital patient ID. The hospital returns the patient's details.
Note: Awell needs to set destination name in the patient import request from Awell to Awell Mirth
2. Option: import via HL7 A19 query (Pull)
A clinical user logged in to the Awell Care app, can make a request to import a patient based on the hospital patient ID or the visit number. This triggers an A19 query to the hospital over VPN in order to pull the patient demographic details. The clinical user will see the patient details received in the Awell Care app and, after choosing a physician, the clinical user can save the patient in Awell’s database.
Technical requirements:
Awell uses a VPN to connect to the hospital to retrieve patient demographic data via an HL7 query (QRY A19)
Awell needs an example of QRY A19 already in use by the hospital
3. Option: import via SIU messages (Pull)
The hospital gathers information on care flows to be started on a daily basis in a local environment through means of an SIU message. Once a day, Awell pulls the available messages to read basic information (e.g. hospital patient ID, physician ID, ... ) and will consequently query the hospital over VPN in order to pull the patient demographic details to create the Patient profile and start-up the required care flow for a specific physician.
Technical requirements:
The hospital makes a location available for Awell to retrieve the SIU messages
Awell uses a VPN to connect to the hospital to retrieve patient demographic data
More information can be found in this article on how to set up SIU messages.
4. Option: import via Awell API (Push)
When the desired event happens (e.g. consultation/discharge of a patient), the hospital's system will send a request to create and/or update a patient in Awell.
Technical requirements:
The hospital installs one or more buttons/links in the EMR for the care team members to click
For every patient, when the care team clicks the button/link, the hospital makes a call to Awell API and Awell automatically creates the patient in the Care app
Note: this flow can also be used to immediately include the patient in the care flow
More information can be found in this article on how to set up the necessary API calls.
Clinical user authentication
Accounts for clinical users are created and handled by Awell. This means that every time a clinical user needs to be created/deleted, the hospital must contact the Awell team.
1. Option: provisioning using Awell's API
Accounts for clinical users are created and handled by the hospital using Awell's API. This means that every time a clinical user needs to be created/deleted, the hospital needs to call the Awell API to automatically add/delete the user.
This implementation can be added to any part of the EMR which seems suitable for the hospital. Examples:
when the user logs in to the EMR
when a login token is requested