HL7 Integration

While HL7 is a standards-based protocol, it is widely-known that different software vendors implement their HL7 interfaces in ways that make them incompatible with each other. As a result an integration engine like MitemView is needed to transform messages between different formats and to route message data accordingly to customizable rules.

MitemView is also used to integrate systems that have HL7 interfaces with legacy hospital information systems that do not. For example, MitemView can be used to connect a physician's office EMR to the hospital system to enable on-line lab order entry and results reporting. Some legacy systems have technical impediments to HL7 connectivity, not to mention that the cost of developing HL7 interfaces can be prohibitive.

MITEM natively supports HL7 messaging by fully implementing and insulating the transport and parsing functions inside a pre-built MitemView adapter. This advanced adapter offers multiple advantages over the typical low-level, code-intensive implementations that are found in other integration servers that include:

• Single-step routing and transformation of messages
• Consistent development experience across all formats and protocols
• Substantially less programming
• Graphical interface for mapping and message processing
• Fastest message processing at runtime
• More robust error handling & recovery
• Externalization of host dependent meta-data
• Connects with 3rd party repositories

MitemView is the only integration engine that allows legacy and HL7 interfaces to be developed using the same tools and techniques. By insulating the developer from working with low-level APIs, the learning curve is dramatically reduced and message formats and protocols can be changed without requiring a re-write of the integration control and business logic. In other words, a developer that knows how to use MitemView to interface with one system will automatically have all the requisite knowledge and skills to interface with any other system.

A further defining characteristic of the MitemView framework is the real-time processing of messages across multiple in-bound and outbound connections. This real-time, asynchronous processing enables maximum flexibility in n-tier server architectures and produces superior end-to-end system performance. MitemView performance levels meet or exceed the near real-time performance of other messaging systems, while eliminating the complex conditional programming required for coordinating multiple transactions. Furthermore, multiple host transactions can be combined, or marshaled, into a single message thereby reducing the total number of transactions that need to be developed and managed.