I was wondering if anyone else has struggled with setting up the Epic Connectors. With working with an implementation partner we have encountered a number of challenges when working with both the EMP and SER connectors.
For my team it has been a very long and hard road to build out this integration with Epic. Now that we are almost to the phase 1 finish line and getting this moved into production, I wanted to share with the community some things I have learned and some of the challenges we faced. With my origination being a Health Care Provider Epic is extremely critical for our ongoing success.
Issues that we encountered so far with getting this integration setup:
Back in 2022 we configured the initial connection to the EMP source. This was the first challenge we faced. In order to talk to Epic so that we could begin the process we had to engage Epic Technical Support and SailPoint Expert Services. We had to have 2 calls before we were able to successfully test the connection.
The next big challenge we had was in late 2023 and early 2024 the connector was sending us a time out issue. We opened a ticket with Expert Services and worked with our implementation partner. The group that worked on this was 2 Epic Experts internal to my organization, implementation partner, ISC Expert internal to my organization, and Expert Services with Epic TS on standby. This took us over 2 months to finally get addressed. And to date every once and while this will pop back up.
Has anyone else had a similar experience with working with the Epic Connectors?
I hope that as a community that we can make this easier for teams to find information and help on being successful with the Epic Intergrations.
We did use this resource a lot during this process. The biggest challenge we had is that the group is not very active. And questions often times go unanswered. I do not think that that group is monitored in the same manner as the developer community is.
We implemented the Epic EMP connector a couple years ago. For the most part, our implementation went very smoothly. Our one issue that we experienced was related to due to the amount of services we had enabled on our test instance of interconnect. It resulted in a header getting too big. That was a few calls with our Epic TS to get that figured out and resolved.
We have not experienced timeout issues as you described. Every now and again, we get a failed aggregation due to timeout (1/month or so), but it is very stable overall.
At least at go live, we tried to stay “out of the box” as much as possible to avoid issues. We recently updated to set start/end dates on LinkedTemplates to better handle our new hire and transfer scenarios. That took a very long time of digging through the documentation and forums to find a good example of how to do that. Our plans for the future is adding training into the process and the SER integration. It is a slow and steady process of enhancements for our Epic integration.
