Integerating Muse (GE) and Epic EMR (Epic Systems)

Although, I am roughly about six months late in posting this article, but I wanted to talk about my experience with integrating Muse and Epic EMR together with an ADT, Orders and Results interfaces.

Overall, I was really pleased with the overall improvement in ROI that was observed with the integrating these two applications. Some key elements are

• Availability of ECG exams in one centralized place for all inpatient/outpatient medical providers
• Excellent automatic ECG result notification for individual outpatient medical providers.
• Complete history of preliminary, final and edited results in the primary EMR application.
• Viewing of complete ECG strips on a single click of a button.
  

From a technical standpoint, following is the list of items that were performed,

• Configure order transmittal (Epic component) to send ECG orders to an HL7 outbound interface.
• Design/build mapping documents for ORM/O01 and ORU/R01 messages between Epic and MUSE. The Epic interfaces that were used were the generic outbound 'orders interface' and inbound 'radiology results' interface into Epic. (The inbound radiology results interface is capable of handling both ORM and ORU messages)
• Since the MUSE web server which hosted the EKG strips in a PDF format, was protected under the standard IIS basic authentication security model, we had to write a small wrapper script that would allow automated logins when the EKG strip links were clicked in Epic EMR.
• Epic EMR in basket routing was adjusted per organizations clinical care settings.

Overall, it was a great project and the end result was absolutely an improvement in patient care.