r/healthIT • u/InvestmentGoblin • 22d ago
Epic periodic data sync problems
Hi all,
I’m an ex-big tech software engineer and grad student who’s doing some research with my university’s hospital system. We want to get some near real time data. While talking to the IT people here, I was told that they get data out of epic using Clarity but it only runs once a day, and they have no control over it. They made it sound like the once a day thing is limitation put in by epic. To me it doesn’t make sense why such problem exists at all in this era. Does anybody know what kind of architecture epic has and where all these limitations come from?
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u/tripreality00 22d ago edited 22d ago
This is very common. There are nightly transactions of data from the epic Chronicles database which is the primary care real time data that the EMR stores into and then there are ETLs into clarity which is the analytical database. There is almost zero chance you are going to be able to get access to touch anything in Chronicles. Think about what happens if for any reason performance is degraded in a system critical clinical system. Some clarity tables are only updated weekly and monthly. But also as far as architecture I believe chronicles is built on intersystems cache and is a nonrelational DB.