I have it on good authority (the CEO of a hospital that uses Epic) that all versions of EPIC are different and unless you have the same version they don’t talk to each other.
Perhaps EpicCare Everywhere is a workaround solution to that. One would think that a hospital or medical care facility shouldn’t have to operate two different packages for EMR in order to function though.
When it comes to systems communicating, that’s known as ‘interfacing’. Most use what’s called a ‘HL7’ protocol or language(I never got into that much). That’s a standard that vendors use to enable their software to communicate with other vendor’s systems/databases. Building and purchasing interfaces can be VERY expensive. Hospitals that have multiple non integrated systems often have an interface person in house to handle it all.
It sounds like from your post that different Epic VERSIONS don’t communicate, and that’s HORRIBLE!!!! They should insure backward compatibility when they make changes. It’s all a money racket really. Pay them to upgrade, or pay MORE to stay with your current version, because you’ll need to buy an interface from us. (they figuratively have a gun to their heads at that point)