Hi Community!

Welcome to Issue #29 of the InterSystems Ideas newsletter! Let's look at the latest news from the Ideas Portal, such as:

✓ General Statistics
✓ Results of the sweepstakes asking for topics for tutorials
✓ New Community Bounty Program "Idea to Application"

Hi Community!

We are excited to announce that the Hospitals On FHIR Meetup will take place during SantExpo 2026!

📅 Date: May 20, 2026, starting at 6:30 PM CEST

📌 Location: HIFE Paris Issy, 15 Rue Guynemer, 92130 Issy-les-Moulineaux, France

Welcome to another installment of the Platforms Update. A few notables to highlight:

• Ubuntu 26.04 has been released, and corresponding IRIS support is coming soon.
• IRIS 2026.2 will bring an end to support for Ubuntu 22.04 and Windows 10.
• Revised minimum CPU specifications are in effect for 2025.3+

For those newly acquainted with these communications, this update provides details about recent enhancements as well as anticipated changes based on current information; however, future projections remain uncertain and the content should not be interpreted as a definitive product roadmap.

Introduction

Today, coding assistants like Claude, GitHub Copilot and Cursor have transformed the way developers write code. However, these tools are limited by being isolated from the systems and data sources that developers work with daily. This limitation can be overcome through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard designed to connect AI assistants to external data sources and tools in a secure and standardized way.

In this review article, we'll explore the current state-of-the-art regarding the MCP within the InterSystems ecosystem.

1. VS Code version 1.60.0 and above

2. install below 3 extensions

   

3. Ctrl + Shift + P show all commands

4. InterSystems: Connect to Server

5. input connection details 

   IP：localhost

        Port: 52773

       choose global & http connection method

       Input username and password of Intersystems management portal

       screenshot for success connection:

#North American Demo Showcase entry. 

>> Answer the question below to be entered in the raffle!

⏯️ AI-Assisted Rare and Complex Disease Detection

This demo shows how InterSystems Health Gateway can be used to pull in outside patient records from networks like Carequality, CommonWell, and eHealth Exchange, creating a more complete longitudinal view in a clinical viewer. That full record is then analyzed by AI to surface potential rare disease considerations with clear reasoning, helping clinicians see patterns they might otherwise miss.

Presenters: 
🗣 @Jesse Reffsin, Senior Sales Engineer at InterSystems
🗣 @Georgia Gans, Sales Engineer at InterSystems
🗣 @Annie Tong, Sales Engineer at InterSystems

At READY 2026, for the very first time, we held a customer hackathon — and it was an amazing experience!
The hackathon took place on the pre-event day at 9 am. Some participants, like me, arrived early due to jet lag—but that actually helped us connect with fellow hackers before the event kicked off.
 

The Beginning

Hi Community,

In our two preceding articles, we explored the fundamentals of the Interoperability Embedded Python (IoP) framework, including message handling, production setup, and Python-based business components.

In this third piece, we will examine advanced methodologies and practical patterns within the IoP framework that are pivotal for real-world interoperability implementations.
We will explore the following topics: 

✅ DTL (Data Transformation Language) in IoP
✅ JSON Schema Support
✅ Effective Debugging Techniques

Collectively, these features help us create maintainable, validated, and easily troubleshootable production-grade interoperability solutions.

This article presents a straightforward approach to automatically and efficiently tune hyperparameters for machine learning models using Optuna as the optimisation framework. We explore how to use both Optuna’s native storage options and InterSystems IRIS as a database backend to track the progress of hyperparameter searches. We also show how MLflow can be used to monitor experiments and manage models through its tracking and model registry UI.

This article is based on this Kaggle Notebook, which you can run and directly edit yourself.

Key Responsibilities & Requirements

Core Infrastructure & Cloud Management

• Full-Stack Administration: Maintain and optimize both Linux (Ubuntu/RHEL) and Windows Server environments.
• Cloud Orchestration: Take full ownership of VM cloud infrastructure, including provisioning, health monitoring, backup and resource scaling.
• Policy Governance: Design and enforce comprehensive SysAdmin and Deployment policies (CI/CD pipelines, automated provisioning, and security hardening).

InterSystems Database Administration

• Platform Expertise: Expert-level administration of both InterSystems IRIS and Caché.

Data privacy regulations such as GDPR, LGPD, and HIPAA demand that organizations know exactly where Personally Identifiable Information (PII) lives inside their databases. Yet in practice, most teams rely on manual inventories, tribal knowledge, or external scanning tools that require data to leave the database engine — a process that itself creates privacy and security risks.

This article presents an MVP that takes a different approach: it runs PII detection inside InterSystems IRIS using Embedded Python, analyzing data where it lives and never exporting it to an external process.

Hi Developers,

We are happy to announce the new InterSystems online programming contest:

🏆 InterSystems Programming Contest: AI Agents for FHIR🏆

Duration: May 25 - June 14, 2026

Prize pool: $12,000

I have a daily service that consumes x number of files, each file name chronologically suffixed sequentially by _1, _2, etc. I only want to process the latest file.

How do I build a business rule so it will only process the last file?

What is wrong with the *inc file code below:

#define ArrayToString(%array,%out,%del)      set %out="" for { ##continue
                                                                                   set key=$order(%array("")) quit:key="" ##continue
                                                                                   set %out=%out_%del_key ##continue
                                                                               } quit

Compilation at calling classmethod as : Set tQStr = $$$ArrayToString(pQArray,tQStr,"##") brings error as:

Hi Community,

We have some exciting news! It's time for the next InterSystems writing competition:

✍️ InterSystems Technical Article Contest 2026 ✍️

Write an article on any topic related to the InterSystems products and services.

🎁 Gifts for everyone: A special gift for each author participating in the competition!

READY is right around the corner, and this year the Application Services team from InterSystems will be hosting a CCR Users GroupMeeting during the conference!This will be held Wednesday, April 29^th during breakfast from 7:30 – 8:30 (breakfast will be served at the meeting room starting at 7:00am).

I need to analyse and improve the performance on some old SQL statements.

One statement uses NVL in the WHERE clause (no wonder why it's slow) but I still have to improve the performance and the data really needs to be the same when returned.

SELECT *
FROM TOURHead, TOURFIND, SGNRFIND, TNRHead
WHERE TOURHead.cl = '123'
AND TOURHead.cl = TOURFIND.cl
AND TOURHead.TOURNR = TOURFIND.TOURNR
AND TOURFIND.cl =* SGNRFIND.cl
AND TOURFIND.SGNR    =* SGNRFIND.SGNR
AND TOURFIND.cl = TNRHead.cl
AND NVL(TOURFIND.TNR, SGNRFIND.TNR) = TNRHead.TNR;

Really hope someone can help me with this one.

I want to develop a REST API for uploading PDF files. I started with OPENAPI spec file. When I test, I get error 8727 referencing missing required parameter file.

"{"$c(13,10,9)"""errors"":[ {"$c(13,10,9,9,9)"""code"":8727,"$c(13,10,9,9,9)"""domain"":""%ObjectErrors"","$c(13,10,9,9,9)"""error"":""ERROR #8727: Parameter required: file."","$c(13,10,9,9,9)"""id"":""RESTRequired"","$c(13,10,9,9,9)"""params"":[""file"""$c(13,10,9,9,9)"]"$c(13,10,9,9)"}"$c(13,10,9)"],"$c(13,10,9)"""summary"":""ERROR #8727: Parameter required: file.

The recently published tutorial "Introduction to InterSystems Data Studio" inspired me to check out this product. And I think it’s an interesting look at how to manage a data fabric without deep-diving into complex code. It allows you to connect disparate data silos, transform the data through automated pipelines, and load it into a unified environment for analysis. So, I decided to write up an example of how you can use it. Basically, I'll walk you through the tutorial in case you don't have time to do it on your own. Though I would definitely suggest you actually follow the tutorial - it has lots of useful information.

To see how it works, I stepped into the shoes of a system administrator, logging in with the provided credentials to explore the interface. The layout centers on a few core pillars: defining where data comes from, cataloging its structure, and building automated "recipes" to move it into production.

And the very first step is to establish a connection to my data.