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Discussion Evgeny Shvarov · Jun 5

Hi folks!

Suppose a new version of your amazing software solution built on IRIS needs some persistence change: some data needs to be converted, some classes get new properties or even renamed, and some data should be prepopulated for newly introduced persistent classes to keep the whole application data consistent.

What are your approaches? 

SQL-based scripts? ObjectScript, or Python? for both directions of migration, up and down? 

Do you autogenerate it with Claude/Codex? What about data-consistency tests?

COuld you please share your thoughts? or libraries?

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New
Article Jonathan Card · May 28 5m read

There seems to be a generous use of ClassMethods in ObjectScript code generally. I hope my own experiences aren't representative, but I bet they are. Forgive me for giving away the ending of this article, but in short: don't use them. Unless you can make a pretty convincing case that you have to, just never use them.1

What is a ClassMethod? In an ObjectScript class, you can define methods in two different ways: in a Method, you must instantiate an instance of the class to call the method, and in a ClassMethod, you can call the method without instantiating the class. Of course, in a ClassMethod, you don't have access to any properties of the object (because there's no object), but you can access globals (they are global, after all) and Parameters (which are class constants).

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Article José Pereira · May 19 13m read

Abstract

Common Table Expressions (CTEs) provide a structured framework for defining reusable intermediate result sets within SQL statements. InterSystems IRIS implements CTEs via the WITH clause, enabling clearer query composition and modular analytical processing while remaining fully integrated with the IRIS cost-based optimizer.

This article explores the semantics of CTEs in InterSystems IRIS, explains their interaction with query optimization, discusses appropriate deployment scenarios, and presents executable examples illustrating practical patterns for production environments.


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New
Question Joshua Wigley · 3 hr ago

Hey All!

I wanted to reach out and get some advice on the best way to interact with a external SQL database, as I'm finding the documentation quite confusing to follow. I'm new to using SQL within InterSystem, and I want to make sure I'm following the best practices.

In essence, what I am trying to achieve, is extracting certain values from a HL7 message and then insert those message field values into an external database. The ODBC, DSN and Credentials details are all setup and working correctly.

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Article Carlos Eduardo Dias Duarte · Jun 7 5m read

Smart Discharge Navigator: An AI Agent for Hospital Readmission Risk — Built on IRIS for Health

Hospital readmissions cost the US healthcare system $17 billion annually. A significant portion of those readmissions are preventable — but only if the right information reaches the right clinician at the right moment: at discharge.

That's the problem I set out to solve with Smart Discharge Navigator, my entry for the InterSystems Programming Contest: AI Agents for FHIR 2026.


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New
Article André Dienes Friedrich · Jun 3 13m read

An engineering walkthrough of the IRIS-CardioFlow project architecture with real code for its AI, FHIR, and connectivity layers and the role of iris-agentic-dev in a modern ObjectScript workflow.


Introduction

Monitoring cardiovascular surgical flow in real time is a classic healthcare integration problem: data arrives from heterogeneous sources, must be persisted with clinical semantics, exposed through an API, and presented in a way the care team can act on. The CardioIris repository (internally named IRIS-CardioFlow) is a lean demonstration of that scenario, built on InterSystems IRIS 2026.

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New
Article Luana Machado · 5 hr ago 12m read

1. Introduction

Epidemiological surveillance is one of the foundational pillars of public health. Régis Júnior et al. (2026) define it as a continuous system of data collection, analysis, interpretation and dissemination of health events — a function whose effectiveness depends critically on the quality of information systems, data analysis capacity, and coordination between different levels of care.

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Discussion Anastasia Dyubaylo · 6 hr ago

Hi Community!

The next addition to the "Code to Care" video series is in progress, and we’d like to hear from you. 

The goal of the project has always been to make complex healthcare and AI concepts easier to understand. In this discussion, we invite you to suggest fresh topics for a conversation.

💡 What could @Don Woodlock, the President of InterSystems, cover in future episodes?

Are there new AI concepts you'd like explained? Healthcare technology trends you're curious about? Architectural patterns, interoperability challenges, or emerging standards you think are worth exploring?

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Article Muhammad Waseem · 8 hr ago 6m read

Hi Community,

Have you ever wished your EHR could think? Not just display data. Not just fire alerts. But actually read a patient record, reason over clinical guidelines, and write a structured referral order back to the system — in response to a single message from a clinician

In this article, I am going to show you how to create your own custom clinical AI agent.


🏥 About iris-fhir-agents App

iris-fhir-agents is a multi-agent clinical AI platform built entirely on InterSystems IRIS for Health.

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Announcement Anastasia Dyubaylo · May 5

Hey Community,

Round 1 of the Community Bounty Program "Idea to Application" is officially open. Three ideas from the Ideas Portal are ready to be implemented — pick one or more, build it, publish it on Open Exchange, and earn Global Masters points. 

🏅Every qualifying submission earns a Credly badge, Global Masters badge, and 10k+ points. Implement all ideas this round and unlock Tier 2 rewards.

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Article Carlos Eduardo Dias Duarte · 21 hr ago 5m read

When I started building Smart Discharge Navigator, I faced a common challenge: FHIR data is stored as JSON bundles, but the analysis I needed required joining multiple resources together, the kind of thing SQL was built for.

InterSystems FHIR SQL Builder solved this completely. Instead of parsing JSON bundles in application code, I was able to write plain SQL directly against FHIR resource projections inside IRIS for Health. This article shows exactly how I used it to build the population-level readmission risk scoring engine at the heart of the application.


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Article Ben Schlanger · 21 hr ago 4m read

Back when I was a Developer Support Engineer in the InterSystems Worldwide Response Center (WRC), I would occasionally receive cases involving large message backlogs in a production. The customer would discover that a subset of queued messages were no longer useful and would ask a question similar to the following:

Is there an established best practice for mass-aborting messages in a specific component's queue that match a particular set of criteria?
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Article Jorge Jaramillo Herrera · May 5 19m read

This article introduces SHAP explainability methods as an approach to understand the reasons behind predictions in machine learning black-box models. It also includes a simple Jupyter notebook that you can use and modify to gain hands-on experience with these concepts:

https://www.kaggle.com/code/jorgeivnjh/explainability-in-ml-models

https://github.com/JorgeIvanJH/Explainability-in-ML-models

We will leverage these concepts for a future implementation in our Continuous Training Pipeline: https://community.intersystems.com/post/complementing-iris-mlflow-continuous-training-ct-pipeline

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Article Sean Connelly · Jun 8 1m read

 

I’m pleased to share a demo of FHIR Agent Studio, now available on YouTube.

FHIR Agent Studio Demo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vktfq_kvNnk

FHIR Agent Studio brings AI agents together with FHIR, InterSystems IRIS, Vector Search, and large language models to demonstrate how developers can explore, build, and test agent-driven healthcare workflows.

You can also find more information here:

Introduction article: https://community.intersystems.com/post/introducing-fhir-agent-studio-ai-agents-fhir-intersystems-iris

GitHub repository: https://github.com/SeanConnelly/ai-studio-for-fhir

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New
Announcement Admin GlobalMasters · Jun 8


Hey! June Article Bounty is live on Global Masters! ☀️🚀

Submit a brand-new article on one of the announced topics and earn a bounty of 🏆 5,000 Global Masters points once it’s approved! 🎉

Here’s the list of June topics:

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New
Article José Pereira · Jun 8 20m read

An AI agent reads the FHIR patient record before the consultation, asks the right questions based on what it already knows, detects critical red flags, and writes its findings back — so the physician arrives prepared.


Healthcare Pain Points Addressed

Before a patient walks into a consultation room, a critical failure has already occurred: nobody read their medical history. The physician has 15 minutes. The patient repeats their conditions, medications, and allergies for the third time that year.

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New
Article Muhammad Waseem · Jun 8 7m read

Hi Community,

In this article, I will introduce my application iris-fhir-agents A multi-agent clinical AI platform powered by InterSystems IRIS for Health. Features agents for triage, specialist consultation, pharmacy safety, and FHIR server exploration — all grounded by IRIS Vector Search RAG. Includes a no-code Agent Builder that lets you design and deploy custom clinical agents without writing a single line of code.

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New
Article Alfaxad Eyembe · Jun 8 6m read

Sara is my entry for the InterSystems AI Agents for FHIR contest. Feel free to try out Sara and vote for Sara on the contest page.

https://youtu.be/UAjI9O848wU?si=BWTVk9gsV4xTOlUj

Physicians spend only 47% of their work time on direct patient care [1]. The rest goes to EHR administrative tasks: order entry, documentation, prior authorizations, with 43% of their time spent on a clinical computer [2]

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Question Anderson Negreli · Mar 25, 2021

Hi,

I'm doing a query in SQL and I need to sort my data by some non-repeated field.

Unfortunately, my data is grouped in a way that I cannot guarantee that any column will not have repeated data, so one solution would be to take the row number.

Also, the Cache is not accepting Row_Number () in my querry and I would like to know if there is another solution to return line numbers or some way to add this function to the Cache.

Best regards.

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Article Sean Connelly · Jun 7 7m read

AI is going to change healthcare, but only if clinicians can trust it and developers can build it without reinventing the plumbing every time. FHIR Agent Studio is my attempt at both: a place to build AI agents for FHIR workflows from reusable building blocks, run them on a real InterSystems IRIS for Health backend, and inspect exactly what each one did at every step.

It is my entry in the InterSystems AI Agents for FHIR contest, and it ships with twelve working agents over a synthetic FHIR repository of around 1,000 patients and 20,000 resources.

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Article Pietro Di Leo · Oct 9, 2025 6m read

Introduction

In my previous article, I introduced the FHIR Data Explorer, a proof-of-concept application that connects InterSystems IRIS, Python, and Ollama to enable semantic search and visualization over healthcare data in FHIR format, a project currently participating in the InterSystems External Language Contest.

In this follow-up, we’ll see how I integrated Ollama for generating patient history summaries directly from structured FHIR data stored in IRIS, using lightweight local language models (LLMs) such as Llama 3.2:1B or Gemma 2:2B.

The goal was to build a completely local AI pipeline that can extract, format, and narrate patient histories while keeping data private and under full control.

All patient data used in this demo comes from FHIR bundles, which were parsed and loaded into IRIS via the IRIStool module. This approach makes it straightforward to query, transform, and vectorize healthcare data using familiar pandas operations in Python. If you’re curious about how I built this integration, check out my previous article Building a FHIR Vector Repository with InterSystems IRIS and Python through the IRIStool module.

Both IRIStool and FHIR Data Explorer are available on the InterSystems Open Exchange — and part of my contest submissions. If you find them useful, please consider voting for them!

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Article Mainza Kangombe · Jun 6 4m read

Healthcare billing isn’t a pipeline. It’s a conversation about trust. 

Every day, millions of clinical transactions flow from doctors’ keyboards to insurance ledgers. Standard health IT systems are built to count these transactions. They store them. They organize them. 

They route them. But standard systems don't notice them. 

We’ve built faster and faster databases to process claims, but we forgot to ask: Does this claim make sense? 

Because we don’t ask in real-time, we’ve accepted a compromise. We pay first, wait six months, and then hire forensic auditors to find the mistakes.

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