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"Open source operating systems, databases, web servers, and system utilities are slowly making inroads into hospital data centers that formerly housed only proprietary technology products. Add another categoiy in which an open source alternative is available: integration engines."
Tim Dotson
Inside Healthcare Computing
The Mirth Project (http://www.mirth project.org) is an open source healthcare interface engine and interface repository created and professionally supported by WebReach (http://www.webreachinc. com). Mirth provides standards-based tools to develop, test, and deploy interoperability solutions for healthcare information systems and information exchanges.
This article provides an overview of healthcare interface engines. It discusses Mirth and the healthcare and connectivity standards it supports. Lastly, the article compares Mirth to other interface engines.
Introduction to Healthcare Interface Engines
Healthcare interface engines, also known as healthcare integration engines, solve the problem of sharing and exchanging data between healthcare applications. Data interchange is a significant problem in healthcare. There are numerous vendors, data providers, and custom applications that need to exchange information using evolving standards. To make things worse, many legacy healthcare applications do not support a standard, yet they are required to intercommunicate with other standards-based applications. Healthcare interface engines connect applications by mapping and transferring data between the applications using standards and data definitions understood natively by each application.
Interface engines have been available for many years and there are many engines available in the market. The cost of proprietary engines range from the low hundreds of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars for organization-level licenses. A review of interface engines is available from KLAS (http://www.klasresearch, com), an independent market intelligence research firm. The KLAS Interface Engines Market Review collects data about leading interface engines and ranks them by several criteria. This article will discuss an open source interface engine called Mirth. Even though Mirth is not ranked by the KLAS review, many people in the Mirth community claim Mirth is functionally equivalent to highend proprietary interface engines.
Introduction to Mirth
Mirth is middleware that connects health information systems so they can exchange clinical and administrative data. Mirth is released under the Mozilla Public License vl.l (http://www.opensource. org/licenses/mozillal.l.php) and is professionally supported by WebReach, a Health information technology (IT) solutions company based in California.
There are many standards in healthcare, with a diverse...