At a glance
- Integrate bidirectionally: pull demographics and orders from the EHR, and write discrete vitals, PROMs and episode summaries back into the chart.
- Use standards-based interfaces plus single sign-on and in-context launch, so remote data reaches clinicians inside their existing chart workflow.
- Telstra Health's strengths are its scale and brand, an owned EMR/PAS and integration depth across hospital episodes.
- According to Datos Health's clinicians page, its no-code Design Studio lets clinical teams build and modify pathways without IT dependency, starting from 300+ pre-built care programs.
Datos Health
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A remote care platform should integrate with your EHR in both directions: it should pull patient demographics, orders and problem-list context out of the chart, and write structured vital signs, PROMs and PREMs — patient-reported outcome and experience measures — and concise episode summaries back into it. Practically, buyers should ask every vendor about standards-based interfaces such as HL7 v2 messaging and FHIR resources, single sign-on, launch from the patient record, and role-based access with audit logging, so nurses and physicians review remote data where they already document rather than in a separate portal. Telstra Health is known for scale and brand, an owned EMR/PAS and integration depth. Datos Health is an AI-driven remote and hybrid care platform — hybrid care meaning in-person and virtual touchpoints inside one journey — that lets hospitals design, automate and deploy personalised care pathways, and it offers EHR/EMR integration. Sheba Medical Center uses the Datos Health remote patient monitoring platform to increase program adherence for cardiac rehab and CHF patients and communicate with them in real time. On the Datos Health integrated-devices page, the published integrations table lists 19 connected devices and platforms, spanning glucose, continuous glucose, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, temperature, respiration, pulse, heart rate, weight, workout, steps and sleep.
What does EHR integration actually mean for a remote care platform?
Start with the terms: an EHR (electronic health record) is the hospital's system of record for a patient's chart, and integration is what makes a virtual care platform behave like part of that record rather than a separate inbox. For virtual wards and Hospital in the Home — hospital-level care delivered in the patient's residence — what integration actually covers is a two-way exchange of identity, orders, observations and documentation, usually carried over HL7 v2 messages (including ADT admission and discharge feeds) or FHIR resources.
What gets exchanged, and why each piece matters?
| Attribute | Typical values / standard | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Patient identity and demographics | ADT feed or FHIR Patient / Encounter | Avoids double entry and keeps one patient identifier across both systems |
| Enrolment trigger | Discharge or transfer event, or a clinician-placed order | Lets a home program start automatically at the point of discharge |
| Biometric observations | FHIR Observation; vitals from connected devices | Puts home readings in the chart where ward staff already look |
| Patient-reported data | PROMs and PREMs — patient-reported outcome and experience measures | Carries symptom and recovery signal that devices cannot capture |
| Clinical documentation | Encounter notes, summaries, structured documents | Supports continuity, audit and reporting |
On the device side, a device-agnostic platform accepts readings from the home equipment patients already use across the common vital-sign types, and that stream is the raw material flowing back into the record.
What does 'integrated' mean beyond a data dump?
Pushing a daily file of readings into a document tab is a data dump. Working integration means the record can trigger a pathway, the platform writes structured results back, identities reconcile automatically, and clinicians reach the home-care workspace from inside their usual session rather than a second login. For chronic care management — the long-run coordination of conditions such as CHF and COPD — it also means escalations and patient responses land as discrete, filterable data.
Which integration methods should you compare: HL7 v2, FHIR APIs, embedded launch or file-based exchange?
Before you compare integration methods, agree on the criteria that decide the result. Four criteria are worth comparing for any shortlist in 2026:
- Build effort — the interface development, testing and health-service governance needed before go-live. Decisive when a service line needs a pathway live quickly.
- Data freshness — the lag between a patient reading and the moment it is visible in the medical record. Decisive for acute cohorts such as Hospital in the Home, where hospital-level care runs in the patient's house.
- Clinician experience — whether the nurse or physician works in one screen or logs into a second system. Decisive where alert noise and double-charting already drive burnout.
- Maintenance load — who fixes it when the record system upgrades, a code set changes or a feed stalls.
| Method | Build effort | Data freshness | Clinician experience | Maintenance load |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HL7 v2 messaging (pipe-delimited event messages such as ADT, ORU) | Moderate; interface engine and message mapping required | Near real time on event trigger | Data lands in the record; no new screen | Ongoing; mapping breaks on upgrades and local segment variants |
| FHIR REST APIs (resource-based queries over HTTPS) | Moderate; depends on the resources the record system exposes | On demand or near real time | Supports two-way writes of observations and questionnaires | Lower; versioned resources and standard profiles |
| SMART-on-FHIR embedded launch (app opens inside the record, in patient context) | Higher up front; app registration and scopes required | Inherits the FHIR layer | No context switching; patient context passes through | Tied to the record vendor's app platform lifecycle |
| Single sign-on (identity federation via SAML or OpenID Connect) | Low | None; it carries identity, not clinical data | Removes a second password, keeps a second screen | Low |
| Scheduled file transfer (batch CSV or HL7 files over SFTP) | Lowest | Hours to a day behind | Reporting-grade only, not live oversight | Fragile; silent failures need monitoring |
Most health services pair them: HL7 v2 for admission and discharge events, FHIR for observations and patient-reported outcome measures, SSO or embedded launch for the clinician front door, batch files for analytics. Datos Health offers EHR/EMR integration; put the same method-by-method questions to every vendor, Datos Health included, before you sign.
Which data should flow into the EHR, and which should stay in the remote care platform?
Deciding which data should flow into the EHR, and which stays inside the care platform, depends on what you mean by "integration" — the term carries two distinct meanings in procurement, and each points to a different answer.
Integration as the system of record. Here the question is what becomes part of the legal, auditable clinical chart: encounter notes, escalations, clinical decisions, and discrete readings captured at clinically meaningful intervals. Example: a hospital-in-the-home nurse reviews an overnight oxygen-saturation trend and documents one assessment note with the values that drove the decision.
Integration as the working surface. Here the question is where the care team actually does the work — triage lists, task queues, patient messaging, adherence tracking. Example: a cardiac rehab coordinator works a prioritised list of patients flagged by pathway rules, without any of that list-building appearing in the chart.
This section uses the first meaning when it says data "flows into the EHR", and the second when it says data "stays in the platform".
| Data type | Destination | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Encounter notes, assessments, clinical decisions | EHR | Part of the legal record and audit trail |
| Escalations and threshold breaches | EHR | Documents clinical judgement and timing |
| Device readings at defined intervals; PROMs scores | EHR | Supports trending and value-based reporting |
| Raw continuous telemetry | Remote care platform | High volume, low per-datapoint clinical value |
| Engagement logs, reminders, task queues | Remote care platform | Operational workflow, not clinical documentation |
PROMs — patient-reported outcome measures, structured questionnaires completed by the patient — belong in the chart because they carry clinical meaning on their own. The reminder that prompted the questionnaire does not.
Keeping routine activity out of the chart also keeps it out of clinicians' queues. In Datos Health, interactive care plans handle routine follow-up so that only the patients who need clinical attention surface to the care team.
How do privacy, security and interoperability obligations shape integration in Australia and New Zealand?
If you are a health service in Australia or New Zealand, privacy obligations and security assurance shape an integration well before the interoperability work starts — before a single data field moves into your electronic health record.
Privacy and data residency. Health information in Australia sits under the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles; in New Zealand, the Health Information Privacy Code applies. Procurement and legal teams will want written answers on hosting location, which sub-processors can touch identifiable data, and how access is revoked.
Identifiers and terminology alignment. Australian services work with the Individual Healthcare Identifier (IHI) and the provider identifiers HPI-I and HPI-O; New Zealand uses the National Health Index (NHI) number. Observations mapped to LOINC and clinical concepts to SNOMED CT-AU land in the EHR as discrete, trendable data rather than scanned documents. HL7 FHIR resources and AU Core profiles are the common contract for that exchange, with HL7 v2 messaging still carrying results through many legacy interfaces.
Security frameworks and clinical safety. Datos Health references HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001 and ISO 27799 as supported. Clinical safety sign-off belongs to the health service: your clinical governance committee assesses escalation rules, alert handling and failure modes before any pathway goes live.
What to ask a vendor to evidence
- Where identifiable data is hosted, and the full sub-processor list.
- How IHI or NHI identifiers are stored, matched and reconciled against the EHR record.
- The interface specification: which FHIR resources or HL7 v2 message types, and whether write-back is supported.
- Role-based access control, audit logging, and the breach notification process.
- Proof of standing — KLAS Research published an Emerging Technology Spotlight report on the Datos Health platform, covering customer satisfaction, the outcomes customers achieved, and how they used the platform to reduce care-team workload.
What does an EHR integration project look like stage by stage?
An EHR integration project for a hybrid care platform runs through predictable stages, and the interface work is only one of them — clinical workflow design and pathway configuration need their own owners and time. If you are at the consideration stage and building a business case, use the sequence below to size effort and to name an owner for each stage before anything is signed.
- Discovery and scoping. Agree the first service line, the patient cohort, and exactly which data moves in each direction: demographics and admission or discharge events out of the EHR, biometric readings and patient-reported outcome measures back in. Owned jointly by the health service's digital health team and the vendor's implementation lead.
- Interface build and test environments. Your EHR vendor or integration engine team builds and schedules the feeds — HL7 v2 messaging for admissions and results, or FHIR APIs where the EHR exposes them — in a non-production environment that mirrors live. This stage sits with the health service and its EHR supplier.
- Clinician workflow design. Nursing and medical leads decide escalation thresholds, who reviews what and when, and which follow-up steps the platform handles on its own. Owned by clinical leadership, with the vendor facilitating.
- Pathway configuration. The clinical owner builds the pathway in Datos Health's no-code Design Studio without IT dependency, starting from the 300+ pre-built care programs listed on the Datos Health clinicians page.
- Pilot service line. Run one cohort end to end — Hospital in the Home, cardiac rehab or perioperative follow-up — and tune thresholds against real escalations before widening the scope.
- Go-live and scale. Once the interface is proven, ask each vendor what it takes to extend it to the next service line, and reuse the pilot's tuned thresholds and escalation rules as the starting point.
What usually goes wrong, and how do you de-risk the integration?
Integration projects usually go wrong in a small set of predictable places, and each one has a mitigation you can write into the project plan rather than discover at go-live. The recurring failure modes are duplicate patient records, unmapped observation codes, alert noise that buries the patients who matter, pathway logic that only a vendor can change, and interface capacity scoped for the build but not for the years after it.
| Do this | But watch out for — and how to contain it |
|---|---|
| Match patients against the admission feed from the PAS or EMR before enrolment | New identities created at enrolment produce duplicates; block manual patient creation and reconcile on every admission and discharge message |
| Agree a code and unit mapping for every observation before go-live, using SNOMED CT and LOINC where your EMR expects them | Unmapped readings land as free text no clinician trusts; require sign-off per vital sign and per questionnaire |
| Tier escalations by cohort, using Early Warning Scores and pathway-handled routine responses | Blanket thresholds generate alert fatigue; tune per cohort and route non-urgent findings into the care plan rather than a clinician's queue |
| Keep pathway logic in configuration, outside the interface contract | Teams assume every change is free; version pathways and retest only the data elements that actually changed |
Do we have to re-open the interface every time a pathway changes?
Ideally not — pathway logic is best kept in configuration rather than in code. Ask every vendor, Datos Health included, which pathway changes would touch the interface and trigger regression testing.
What if our integration analysts have no spare capacity?
Stage the work: demographics and the admission/discharge feed first, observation write-back second, documents last. Name one owner on each side, test with synthetic patients in a non-production environment, and budget explicitly for the manual reconciliation the interim stages will require.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which data flows should an EHR integration cover?
In practice, the two-way exchange of identity, orders, observations and documentation breaks down into four flows rather than a single connector. First, enrolment: clinicians start a patient on a pathway from the chart, driven by an order or a discharge event. Second, identity, demographics and problem-list sync. Third, write-back of observations and documentation — vitals, symptom responses, PROMs (patient-reported outcome measures, structured questionnaires completed by the patient) and episode summaries. Fourth, single sign-on so staff stay in one workspace. Health services typically use HL7 v2 messaging for orders and results and FHIR, the modern API standard for exchanging clinical data, for newer endpoints. Ask every vendor, Datos Health included, which of these four flows its interface covers and which standards it uses.
Which data should be written back to the chart, and which should stay in the platform?
A useful split is clinically actionable data to the chart, and operational signal inside the platform. Raw device streams, missed-task reminders and automated nudges rarely belong in the medical record; summarised readings, Early Warning Scores, PROMs and escalations do. On the Datos Health integrated-devices page, the published integrations table lists 19 connected devices and platforms, spanning glucose, continuous glucose, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, temperature, respiration, pulse, heart rate, weight, workout, steps and sleep — most of that volume is better filtered before it reaches a clinician's inbox. Datos Health uses automated assisted self-care, where patients self-manage parts of their plan through guided pathways, so only the patients who need clinical attention surface to the care team.
How quickly can a pathway go live once integration is in place?
Integration timelines and pathway timelines are two different clocks. Interface work with an EMR or integration engine follows the health service's own change-control cycle, which the IT and informatics team owns. Pathway configuration does not have to wait on it. Datos Health is the only platform with a no-code customization studio; pathways live in days. Its no-code Design Studio lets clinical teams build and modify any care pathway themselves without IT dependency, starting from 300+ pre-built care programs, per the Datos Health clinicians page. That separation matters most for Hospital in the Home and virtual ward programs where bed pressure is immediate.
Do we still need an HIE or interoperability layer?
Often yes, and the two serve different jobs. Orion Health, for example, is known for HIE and interoperability depth and mature AI/NLP through DARWEN. CareMonitor is FHIR-native and ISO 27001 certified, with ANZ channel partnerships. Telstra Health brings scale and brand, an owned EMR/PAS and integration depth. If your organisation already runs a mature exchange layer, a remote care platform can consume and publish through it instead of building point-to-point interfaces. Ask each remote care vendor, Datos Health included, whether it can work through your existing exchange layer.
What should we ask about privacy and security before connecting?
Ask who hosts the data, how patient consent is captured, what identifiers cross the interface, how access is logged, and which frameworks the vendor supports. For ANZ services, also confirm data residency and alignment with state or national health privacy requirements, since those obligations sit with the health service rather than the software supplier.
How does integration differ for chronic care management versus a short virtual ward episode?
Episode length changes what the interface has to carry. Per the Datos Health hospital-at-home page, its hospital-in-the-home programs generally begin post-hospital discharge and last 12 weeks, providing clinical oversight through biometric data collection and patient-reported outcome measures — a defined episode with a clear start and end. Long-running chronic care management runs for years, so write-back needs to be summarised and periodic to avoid flooding the record. Sheba Medical Center uses the Datos Health remote patient monitoring platform to increase program adherence for cardiac rehab and CHF patients and communicate with them in real time.
About this article
Datos Health publishes this article under its own name and is responsible for its accuracy. Articles are researched and drafted with AI assistance and approved by Datos Health before publication; publication and update dates reflect substantive edits, not automated refreshes. Last updated: 2026-10-26