Conduit is the integration and interoperability engine that replaces Epic Bridges with a FHIR R4-native platform. Where Bridges bolts interoperability onto a proprietary data model as an afterthought, Conduit is built from the foundation on open standards — every clinical data element is natively FHIR-addressable, every legacy system speaks through a universal translation layer, and every third-party application connects through standards-based APIs without custom development or vendor permission.
Epic processes 45 billion interface messages per month across its network. That sounds impressive until you understand the architecture: those messages flow through proprietary channels, in proprietary formats, controlled by a single vendor that decides who can connect, what data they can access, and how much they pay for the privilege. Epic Bridges is not an open integration engine — it is a gatekeeper. Third-party vendors cannot connect independently; they must work through Epic customers and, in many cases, with Epic itself. The result is a healthcare data ecosystem where the vendor that stores the data also controls who can use it.
The 21st Century Cures Act was supposed to end information blocking. Instead, it created a compliance checkbox while the fundamental architecture of vendor-controlled data silos remained unchanged. Conduit is the architectural answer to that structural problem.
Conduit is not a module bolted onto an EHR. It is the connective tissue of the entire Clarion ecosystem — the infrastructure layer through which every clinical system, every third-party application, every medical device, and every external health network communicates. It is invisible when it works. It is indispensable always.
Conduit does not wrap a proprietary data model in a FHIR facade. The underlying data architecture is FHIR R4 from the ground up. Patient demographics, clinical observations, medications, conditions, procedures, diagnostic reports, and care plans are stored as native FHIR resources. When an external application queries a Patient resource, it receives a standards-compliant response — not a proprietary translation that may lose fidelity. This distinction matters profoundly: a FHIR facade introduces latency, mapping errors, and version lag. A FHIR-native architecture eliminates them entirely.
FHIR is the future. HL7v2 is the present — and the present includes thousands of laboratory systems, pharmacy dispensing cabinets, radiology information systems, and billing platforms that will speak HL7v2 for the next decade. Conduit's Legacy Bridge provides bidirectional, real-time translation between HL7v2 message types (ADT, ORM, ORU, SIU, DFT, MDM) and their FHIR R4 resource equivalents. An HL7v2 ORU lab result message arrives from a third-party LIS, and Conduit translates it to a FHIR DiagnosticReport resource that flows natively into the Clarion clinical record — with every field mapped, every code system reconciled, and every edge case handled through configurable transformation rules.
SMART on FHIR enables any authorized application to launch inside the clinical workspace with full patient context — no custom HL7 interfaces, no Bridges configuration, no vendor negotiation. A genomics interpretation tool, a clinical trial matching engine, a patient education platform, or a specialty-specific decision support app can be connected to Conduit in 48 hours, tested in a sandbox environment, and deployed to production in days, not months. This is the app ecosystem model that healthcare has been promised for a decade but never received from vendors whose business model depends on keeping third-party innovation out.
CDS Hooks is the standard that enables external services to inject clinical decision support directly into the EHR workflow at defined trigger points — patient-view, order-select, order-sign, encounter-start. Conduit implements CDS Hooks as a first-class capability, allowing both internal Sentinel AI engines and external third-party CDS services to surface recommendations at the exact moment the clinician needs them. A payer's prior authorization service can respond at order-sign. A pharmacogenomics engine can recommend dosing adjustments at order-select. A clinical trial matching service can display eligible trials at encounter-start. All through standardized hooks — no custom integration, no vendor gatekeeping.
A modern hospital generates clinical data from hundreds of connected devices — bedside monitors, ventilators, infusion pumps, pulse oximeters, glucometers, fetal heart rate monitors, and increasingly, patient-worn sensors that transmit data from home. Conduit's Device Hub provides a unified connectivity layer that speaks IEEE 11073 SDC for bedside devices, Bluetooth Low Energy for portable sensors, and FHIR Device/Observation resources for data normalization. Device data flows directly into the patient's clinical record without manual transcription — a nurse does not re-enter a blood pressure that the monitor already captured.
Epic's Care Everywhere network connects Epic customers to each other — creating a powerful but closed ecosystem. If the patient's prior records are in a non-Epic system that does not participate in Care Everywhere, they may be invisible. Conduit participates in every major health information exchange network: Carequality (which includes Epic's network but extends far beyond it), CommonWell Health Alliance, eHealth Exchange, and the emerging TEFCA framework. When a patient presents at a Clarion-powered hospital, Conduit queries all available networks simultaneously and presents a unified longitudinal record regardless of which EHR vendor stored the original data.
Every integration ultimately comes down to mapping: translating data from one system's format into another's. In Epic Bridges, this requires certified interface analysts who understand both Epic's proprietary data structures and the external system's format. In Conduit, mapping is visual, auditable, and reusable. A drag-and-drop mapping editor shows source fields on the left and target fields on the right. Code system translations (ICD-10, SNOMED CT, LOINC, RxNorm, CPT) are handled by a built-in terminology service that auto-suggests mappings and flags ambiguities. Once a mapping is built for one interface, it can be templated and reused across similar connections — so the hundredth lab system integration takes hours, not weeks.
An integration engine that processes millions of messages per day is only as reliable as your ability to see when something goes wrong. Conduit's observability layer provides real-time dashboards showing message throughput, latency percentiles, error rates, and queue depths across every active interface. Anomaly detection identifies patterns — a lab system that suddenly stops sending results, an ADT feed that begins producing duplicate messages, an API consumer that exceeds its rate limit — and alerts the integration team before clinical workflows are affected. Every message is logged with full payload visibility, searchable by patient, timestamp, message type, and source/destination system.
A regional health network operating eight hospitals across four different EHR platforms (two Epic, one Cerner, one Meditech) deployed Conduit as a unified integration layer. Within 90 days, every hospital could query patient records from every other hospital in real time — regardless of which EHR stored the data. The HL7v2 Legacy Bridge connected 147 existing interfaces without re-engineering them. The FHIR gateway enabled 23 third-party clinical applications to connect across the entire network through a single API. Prior to Conduit, building a cross-platform interface required an average of 14 weeks and $85,000 per interface. After deployment, new interfaces averaged 6 hours and $0 in incremental cost.
A 1,200-bed academic medical center deployed Conduit's Device Hub to connect bedside monitors, ventilators, and infusion pumps directly to the patient record. Before deployment, nurses manually transcribed vital signs from monitor screens into the EHR — an estimated 420,000 hours annually across the institution. After Conduit connected 4,200 bedside devices through the IEEE 11073 SDC protocol, vital signs flowed automatically into the patient's flowsheet within one second of capture. Nursing documentation time decreased by 28 minutes per patient per shift. Two medication pump programming errors were caught in the first month by Conduit's smart pump verification system — errors that would have reached patients under the previous workflow.
We had fourteen integration analysts maintaining 380 interfaces. Their entire job was keeping data flowing between systems that should have been able to talk to each other natively. Conduit replaced the custom plumbing with a universal fabric. We did not eliminate those fourteen people — we redeployed them to build clinical analytics, quality dashboards, and population health tools that actually create value. Infrastructure should be invisible. Conduit made it invisible.
Every minute a nurse spends typing a blood pressure that a machine already measured is a minute she is not at the bedside. Four hundred twenty thousand hours. That is the number we quantified. That is 202 full-time nursing equivalents spent transcribing numbers from one screen to another. Conduit gave us those nurses back — not by hiring, not by overtime, but by connecting the devices that were already in the room to the record that was already in the system. The technology existed on both sides. What was missing was the bridge between them.
See Conduit configured for your integration landscape — your legacy systems, your device fleet, your network participation requirements.