Executive Summary

For twenty years or more, large financial institutions have been locked in a battle between the need for extremely high performance transaction processing and the demands of downstream applications that can deliver competitive advantage if they can get real time access to this transactional data. When individual database servers could no longer handle simultaneous transaction and query workloads, many firms turned to replication, offloading data access onto read-only copies of production databases.

Executive Overview

The healthcare software market offers exciting and significant growth opportunities. Yet, while some healthcare software companies enjoy incredible growth, others under-perform, languish, or even fail. There are many criteria for success in this market, but two are particularly critical:

• Breakthrough solutions: In every part of the world, healthcare buyers are demanding broad and deep new capabilities that eliminate cumbersome processes, deliver breakthrough results, and advance the missions of their rganizations.

InterSystems Caché 2015.1 soars from 6 million to more than 21 million end-user database accesses per second on the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 v2 family compared to Caché 2013.1 on the Intel® Xeon® processor E5 family

Overview

With data volumes soaring and the opportunities to derive value from data rising, database scalability has become a crucial challenge for a wide range of industries. In healthcare, the rising demands for healthcare services and significant changes in the regulatory and business climates can make the challenges particularly acute.

Introduction

Australia's recent launch of the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) - a significant step towards establishing a national e-Health infrastructure - has simultaneously provided a boost to shared Electronic Patient Record (EPR) projects and delivered a wake-up call to healthcare providers about their readiness for connected care initiatives. In countries around the world, the era of connected care is here.

The PCEHR has increased both the push and pull factors that will lead to widespread shared EPR adoption.

Introduction

Impedance mismatch is a term commonly used to describe the problem of an object-oriented (OO) application housing its data in legacy relational databases (RDBMS). C++ programmers have dealt with it for years, and it is now a familiar problem to Java and other OO programmers.

Impedance mismatch arises from the inherent lack of affinity between the object and relational models.

Introduction

In healthcare, information accessibility can impact the outcome of a medical decision, or the success of a bundled payment initiative. To ensure that the right information is available at the right place and time, healthcare organizations typically have used HL7® interface engines to share data among clinical applications. But the demands on healthcare information technology are changing so rapidly that these simple engines are no longer sufficient.

Introduction

In today's world, an ever-increasing number of purchases and payments are being made by credit card. Although merchants and service providers who accept credit cards have an obligation to protect customers' sensitive information, the software solutions they use may not support "best practices" for securing credit card information. To help combat this issue, a security standard for credit card information has been developed and is being widely adopted.The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) is a set of guidelines for securely handling credit card information.

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?

The body of any Ensemble message is represented by a persistent class that has one property for each value that the message is intended to carry.

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.

If your first project is to deploy a small number of reusable services in a matter of months but you know that four years from now you might have hundreds of services, an enterprise SOA infrastructure and specialized governance technology you have a dilemma.

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.