Introduction to Interface Engines
The challenge of sharing and transferring data amongst healthcare applications is solved by healthcare interface engines, also known as healthcare integration engines. In the healthcare industry, data transfer is a major issue. Many suppliers, data sources, and specialized applications require the sharing of information utilizing emerging standards. To make matters worse, many older healthcare applications do not support a standard, despite the fact that they are required to interface with other systems that do. Healthcare interface engines link applications by mapping and transmitting data between them based on standards and data definitions that each application understands natively.
Interface engines have been around for a long time, and there are a lot of them on the market. For organization-level licences, proprietary engines cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars. KLAS, an independent market intelligence research group, has an evaluation of interface engines. The KLAS Interface Engines Market Review compiles information on top interface engines and ranks them according to a number of factors. Mirth is an open source interface engine that will be discussed in this post. Despite the fact that Mirth is not graded by KLAS, many Mirth users believe it is functionally equivalent to high-end proprietary interface engines.
Introduction to Mirth Interface Engine
Mirth is a piece of middleware that connects health information systems so that clinical and administrative data can be shared. Mirth is licenced under the Mozilla Public License v1.1 and is professionally supported by WebReach, a California-based provider of health information technology (IT) solutions.
Interoperability Issue
In healthcare, there are numerous standards, as well as a wide range of processes and data types. Labs, pharmacies, clinics, hospitals, and other health information systems are just a few examples. Different protocols, mismatched versions, and incompatible data may exist in each of these systems. Some systems may actively use HL7, X12, and DICOM pictures, while others may simply read from or communicate with XML and comma separated values from a database. When you consider the lack of control administrators have over current and historical systems, it’s clear that healthcare interoperability is a problem. This is where Mirth, the easy-to-use and deploy middleware solution, comes in. Whether they speak a standard healthcare language or not, mirth can exist between any number of health information systems.
Why Mirth over other Interface Engines?
Mirth is a versatile health IT infrastructure component that can fulfil a variety of functions. It can serve as a central integration exchange for a hospital, an information gateway for a clinic or reference lab, or an information exchange for a Health Information Exchange (HIE) or a Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) (LHIN). It can also be used as an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool or as an integrated interface engine for an electronic health record (EHR).
Mirth accelerates the construction of interfaces for secure data transmission between formats by employing a point-and-click interface and JavaScript to map data pieces. For instance, data can be transferred from a delimited file to HL7 and vice versa. This simplicity of use lowers the obstacles to forming health information exchanges combining many information systems and improves initiatives targeted at enhancing patient safety and service continuity.
Mirth also offers an open framework and repository for developing and sharing Mirth channels. A Mirth channel is a message routing, filtering, and transformation interface that sends messages from one source to one or more destinations. For more complicated logic, these channels can be connected together. Sharing channels allows members of the healthcare IT community to benefit from the efforts of others and avoids the redundancy that now exists in processes that require each business to build data mappings across systems. The healthcare IT community is used to a closed and proprietary system, so an attitude that emphasizes collaboration and openness is a significant step forward. This open, community-based strategy has been shown to accelerate innovation in other industries, and it is now available for the healthcare industry now.
Healthcare and Connectivity Standards that are Supported
Mirth supports HL7 for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information, DICOM for medical imaging, X12 for electronic data transmission, NCPDP for pharmacy data, and XML for information flow for lab results, medical records, radiology data, transcription data, claims data, and so on. The next sections go over these requirements in further detail.
The following are examples of supported healthcare data standards:
Health Level 7 (HL7 v2 & v3) is a widely accepted standard for sharing healthcare data between apps and systems. Here’s where you can learn more.
DICOM stands for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine, and it is a standard that allows imaging devices and systems to communicate and share images. Mirth supports the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP) Script standard, which makes ePrescribing easier. Here’s where you can learn more.
Mirth supports EDI X12 for healthcare and insurance transaction sets. Here’s where you can learn more.
XML: Mirth’s native format is XML, and it includes extensive XML support, including XSLT support.
Mirth also provides robust support for the following connectivity standards and protocols:
- JDBC
- SMTP
- Samba
- Delimited file such as CSV
- FTP and SFTP
- HTTP/HTTPS
- JavaScript Custom Connector
- JMS
- MLLP
- PDF and RTF
- SOAP and TCP
Mirth Connect has a bright future ahead of it. Every day, new healthcare companies join the Mirth Connect network, and Mirth developers continue to tweak and optimize the integration engine. We are a small team that deals with major interoperability issues on a daily basis. With our extensive knowledge of interoperability, we can seamlessly integrate ourselves into your organization as if we were full-time employees. Using Mirth Connect, we provide unique interfaces for healthcare vendors, HIEs, health systems, hospitals, medical practices, payors, and accountable care organizations.