Halo Connect is a platform that enables integration with on-premise Practice Management Systems (PMSs), sometimes known as Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) via a modern, RESTful API.

Typically, if you want your product to integrate with General Practice software in Australia, you first have to build a local agent, get it installed at every practice you want to integrate with and then provide ongoing support to manage that agent. Halo Connect allows you to focus on what you do best – creating awesome health tech products – instead of local database sync.

If you manage a practice, you’re probably sick of having ten or more agents running on your server, some of which are old, insecure and may cause frequent issues or even crash your server. Halo Connect solves this issue by replacing that model with a single, reliable agent (Halo Link), with integrators connecting in the cloud via Halo API instead.

Ok…and which PMSs can I integrate with?

Unlocking Primary Care is our initial focus. Currently, Halo Connect integrates with Best Practice Software’s ‘Premier’ (Bp Premier), the leading Practice Management System for General Practice in Australia. We are actively talking to other PMS Providers and hope to have news on this front soon!

Who benefits from Halo Connect?

It depends who you ask! There are a range of benefits for the health ecosystem including for practices, integrators, PMS vendors and, ultimately, patients.

For Integrators, Halo Connect:

• Lowers the barrier to entry, by removing the need to build your own agent -- just sign up with Halo, provide your approved Bp credentials, define your data requirements and Halo will take care of the rest
• Saves you money on support, by monitoring agent instances for outages and proactively supporting practices to get back online, we remove the need for Integrators to run a dedicated help desk for their local agent
• Enables rapid growth, Halo Connect will soon be bundled with Bp Premier, so you can instantly add any site that enables you rather than liaising with IT providers
• Ensures safe, secure and reliable data transmission, by using a well-behaved agent that protects practice infrastructure, and looking after encryption, transmission and keeping agents up to date.

For Practices, Halo Connect:

• Simplifies your IT infrastructure, by replacing the current required model of 1 local agent per integrator per practice with a single agent that is well-behaved
• Reduces the burden on PMS installations, by consolidating and limiting queries to ensure database health is maintained
• Streamlines integrator onboarding, allowing you to enable new partners with a single click from within Premier
• Improves safety and security, by using a modern agent built on Microsoft Azure and hosted on Australian servers.

For PMS Vendors, Halo Connect:

• Protects local instances, with queueing, limiting and batching
• Matches your security, by only allowing access to data and roles that have been approved by the PMS and enabled by the practice
• Drives innovation, by including a FHIR-compatible API on our roadmap, we’re enabling easy integration for new and emerging health tech such as wearables or new medical devices
• Supercharges your partnerships program, by lowering the technical barrier to entry for new integrators, you could massively broaden the number of integrators you partner with, providing more functionality to your products and driving revenue growth

Tell me how the technology works…

Here are the nuts and bolts but we’re happy to answer any questions you might have!

• Halo Connect is built on Microsoft Azure and hosted in Australia
• It is a RESTful API accessible through HTTPs
• All endpoints return JSON-encoded responses and use standard HTTP response codes
• No practice data is stored by Halo Connect and Halo Connect itself does not have access to medical practice data. Our Public Documentation is available here.

That all sounds pretty good. Where are you headed next?

Our SQL Passthrough API is already live and being rolled out across practices with Bp Premier as we speak. Over the next 12 months, we’ll be building out more specific REST or FHIR endpoints for things like Appointments, Payments, Secure Messaging, e-Ordering etc. These endpoints will work across both Bp Premier and Bp’s incoming Cloud PMS, so that the transition will be seamless for integrators.

Whilst we’re currently laser focused on bridging the gap between on-premise and cloud systems by making on-premise systems “cloud-enabled”, we believe there’s a bright future for connecting the many siloed parts of the health, aged care and disability sectors in Australia, including hospitals, pharmacies, allied health, aged care, payers and government providers.

Our dream is that one day, awesome products to improve patient care are built that leverage our platform to transfer data to and from all these sources.

If I have any other questions, where should I go?