HL7 Interface Engine Recommendations [closed]

Question

I am doing some consulting work for a small pharmacy services provider that needs a HL7 interface engine setup for it to provide interfacing to products that run on the LAMP stack.

More specifically what I am looking for is a HL7 engine that runs on *NIX and can insert data from a HL7 v2.X message into a MySQL database. The data that is inserted will be data taken out of arbitrary fields so it needs to do parsing.

I tried using Mirth, but its ability to make any seemingly simple task overly complex and the extreme slowness of its client interface/response times has made us very gun shy on it. When I state a simple task I mean like sending back a custom ACK message based upon a few rules forces me to write 100 lines of javascript and after that still getting horrible response times.

I loved Iguana and wanted to use it, but they quoted us between $12k and $15k for a single instance of it on a single server. It was a good piece of software but not THAT good to justify a price tag like that as well as that is well beyond what my customer is willing to pay for a single piece of software that drives a small part of their business.

Does anybody have any recommendations for open source and/or proprietary software that will meet these needs?

Answer 1

The best open source options we use in our business are Mirth and OpenESB. Which version of Mirth have you used? I think you would be surprised by the improvements in 2.0.

Another option that has a reasonable price tag is Orion Rhapsody. We find this to be the easiest to use at the lowest price for licensed engines. It is a great fit for health care organizations on a budget. If you need a contact to setup a demo I can help with that.

Answer 2

If you're having to write over 100 lines of Javascript to send a custom ACK I would suggest you are doing it wrong. The actual sending of the ack is a single line of code using the responseMap.put function. Perhaps post a summary of what you're trying to do and your existing code at the Mirth support forum; there are many folks, including me, who can take a look at it.

It's always disappointing to hear bad feedback on Mirth as most of the time it's not a shortcoming in the product but in the programming. As I say, quite happy to help - just post in the right place.

Answer 3

Unfortunately, healthcare system interfacing is not always trivial nor cheap. I'm not aware of any products meeting your requirements in terms of pricing and feature set. If you find any, let me know... :)

If your primary requirements is to cut license costs and you need to exchange data using HL7 only, need minimal data mapping and no message manipulation (be careful... it's always worst than it looks like first), you could develop your own engine using HAPI as foundation. It's a free HL7 parser but be prepare to pay for the extra development work.

Answer 4

I think Mirth is still your best option, because openESB is overly complex and difficult to maintain for a "small pharmacy services provider". If you are using LLP then you shouldn't have to customize the solution.