Executive Summary

InterSystems HealthShareÆ and InterSystems EnsembleÆ both provide a rapid integration and development platform with built-in capabilities for the high-speed processing of HL7 messages. For the purposes of HL7 v2 message routing the two products are equivalent in performance. For brevity, this document will just say Ensemble in many places but it should be taken to apply equally to both products.

Business Transformation for Application Providers

Introduction

InterSystems regards the enterprise service bus (ESB) as a business transformation engine for application providers.

Abstract

In a recent benchmark test of an application based on InterSystems Caché, a sustainable rate of 8.9million database accesses/second, with peaks of 16.9 million database accesses/second, was achieved. These results were from a test performed on a connected system of eight applications servers, using Intel Xeon 5570 processors, and running Linux as the operating system. This benchmark shows that:

Featuring the results of the HIMSS Analytics Interoperability Study

Introduction

Customers who switch to Caché from relational databases report that their average performance is up to 20 time faster, running on the same hardware, with no changes to the application. What is it about Caché that lets applications run so fast?

Introduction

Abstract

The European Space Agency (ESA) has chosen InterSystems Caché as the database technology for the AGIS astrometric solution that will be used to analyze the celestial data captured by the Gaia satellite.

The Gaia mission is to create an accurate phase-map of about a billion celestial objects. During the mission, the AGIS solution will iteratively refine the accuracy of Gaia's spatial observations, ultimately achieving accuracies that are on the order of 20 microarcseconds.

Strategic Interoperability

Executive Overview

This white paper discusses the critical requirements for the U.S. Departments of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) to share Service members’ medical records – including real-time access to a complete composite health record – and it proposes an immediate solution via implementation of a health informatics platform. This approach will provide significant and clearly visible results in a matter of months, while positioning the Departments for strategic improvements in the years ahead.

What is Integration

Abstract

A global provider of mobile telecommunications software tested the performance of InterSystems Caché and Oracle as the database in a simulated data mart application. They found Caché to be 41% faster than Oracle at building a data mart. When testing the response time to SQL queries of the data mart, Caché's performance ranged from 1.8 times to 513 times faster than Oracle.

Introduction

Goals of the project

North Shore-LIJ is a health system serving the needs of over seven million people through 17 hospitals, 400 ambulatory practices, and three skilled nursing facilities as well as home and hospice care. Our healthcare system, including its CareConnect insurance company, is at the forefront of payment reform and population health management.

The Business Case for InterSystems Ensemble

This document presents a business case for replacement of older interface engine software with our next-generation rapid integration product, Ensemble. To illustrate the business case, our primary example will be an InterSystems customer (Metro Health Corporation) that replaced its SeeBeyond eGate (now Sun SeeBeyond) interface engine with Ensemble. Other organizations also will comment on reasons for switching to Ensemble.

The CIO Perspective

Executive Summary

Introduction

Because of increasing business and governmental pressures to integrate their operations, the financial services industry is developing a number of standards for data exchange and other common functions. Standards such as XBRL, FpML, MDDL, RIXML, and FIXML are all specialized dialects of XML (Extensible Markup Language). Any financial services application with good support for XML will be able to communicate effectively using one or more of the emerging industry standards.

Information Sharing Enables Health Plans to Leverage Data and Analytical Assets to Deliver Sustained Value

Executive Summary

The shared-risk payment models that are central to health reform all require tight coordination among payers, providers, and patients if they are to succeed. As payers and providers enter into more and more such agreements, they need to enhance success by communicating and collaborating more effectively with their partners and actively engaging, supporting, and empowering their members.

Providing a reliable infrastructure for rapid, unattended, automated failover

Technology Overview

Traditional availability and replication solutions often require substantial capital investments in infrastructure, deployment, configuration, software licensing, and planning. Caché Database Mirroring (Mirroring) is designed to provide an economical solution for rapid, reliable, robust, automatic failover between two Caché systems, making mirroring the ideal automatic failover high-availability solution for the enterprise.

Strategic interoperability —The key to connected care

Introduction

The aging population and increasing incidence of chronic diseases are putting unmanageable pressures on healthcare services, not just in Europe, but worldwide. The current models of healthcare are unsustainable in the face of increased demand for services and rising costs. This was evident even before the financial crisis led to severe cuts in healthcare budgets in many countries.

Introduction

The Business Processing Language - for orchestration and long-running business processes.

Ensemble can orchestrate calls to external systems. Very often this is done to implement or automate a long-running business process - that is, real business processes where people interact with a series of different systems to complete complex tasks. BPL (the Business Processing Language) provides a graphical way to create these orchestrations.

How do you balance the need to achieve an early success with SOA against the requirement for an architecture that will deliver long term success? You don't want to get bogged down in architectural committees for three years, but you don't want to make short term decisions that will be roadblocks to long term success.

Introduction

Application integration at its simplest is often just one application sending a message to another to notify it of some change. Perhaps when a patient arrives at a hospital, the registration system will send a message to clinical systems so they have all demographic data ready to use. Of perhaps it is just a nightly file transfer from the sales system to the accounting system.

But modern application integration platforms or suites can do a lot more than this to help applications work together and add real value to the enterprise.

Are you new to Ensemble? InterSystems provides several tools to learn the basics of Ensemble and get on your way to becoming an expert in the technology. Before installing Ensemble, take a look at the Ensemble Technology Overview and Getting Started with Ensemble in documentation. Respectively, these documents explain features and major components of Ensemble as well as how to install the software.

Introduction

HL7 V2 message routing solutions often have hundreds of business services, processes and operations. Inevitably things will go wrong and you have to monitor the production to be able to react quickly and resolve any problems before they can become serious issues.

Ensemble includes some powerful alerting capabilities that can help, but if you aren't careful you will be inundated with alerts and your inbox more or less becomes a copy of the event log defeating the object of the exercise.

Introduction

This paper describes how Ensemble behaves after a system crash or similar uncontrolled shutdown or failover. Ensemble is normally configured to start processing messages automatically when the operating system restarts or when the system has failed over to a cluster member or mirror member. No manual intervention is required. But, in order for your system to robustly handle system failure and restart, you must understand how Ensemble handles these conditions and develop your productions using the rules and guidelines in this document.

Ensemble is based on message flow, and a data transformation is a way to convert from one message type to another. DTL (Data Transformation Language) adds a layer to this - it provides a graphical way to do the conversion. This is really helpful because most of the time, people with domain-specific knowledge may not have extensive coding skills. However, you always have the ability to do some coding, so if you need or want to, this is available.

DTL has several components: the data transformation engine, the language itself, and the DTL editor.

An introduction to virtual documents

Ensemble virtual documents enable your productions to work with large and complex documents with little overhead.

What is a virtual document?

A virtual document is a special kind of Ensemble message, for use with Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) messages and with XML documents.

How are virtual documents different from standard messages?