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.

I've seen that %JSON.Adaptor makes it easy to serialize and deserialize objects to JSON, but I've also seen people building custom serialization logic. Are there scenarios where %JSON.Adaptor falls short, such as handling nested objects, null values or custom field naming conventions? What has been your experience?

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?

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

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.

I know IRIS has a built-in testing framework, but I'm not sure how to write tests that validate the full message flow through a Production without depending on external systems. Do you mock Business Operations? Is there a pattern you use to test integration scenarios in an isolated and repeatable way?

If I need to add or change properties in a message class that is already being used by a running Production, what is the safest way to do this? Are there risks with existing messages in the queue or in the message store? Is there a migration strategy the community recommends?

I understand that Business Rules can be used to route or transform messages without touching code. But I'm not clear on when it's better to use a Business Rule versus handling the logic directly inside a BPL or a custom BP class. What criteria do you use to decide between them?

In .NET projects I usually rely on appsettings per environment. In IRIS Productions, settings are stored per component and seem tied to the namespace. What strategies do you use to manage different configurations across environments without manually changing settings every time you promote a Production?

Hi Community,

We're excited to invite you to the upcoming webinar: 

👉 Can FHIR also serve as input for operational management? 👈

🗓️ Date & Time: Wednesday, June 10th, 10 am CEST

In the previous article, we used pyprod to create production components while relying on the UI for production configuration. That same production can now be defined entirely in Python:

from intersystems_pyprod import Production, ServiceItem, ProcessItem, OperationItem

iris_package_name = "HelloWorld"

class MyProduction(Production):
    services = [
        ServiceItem(
            "MyServiceName",
            "HelloWorld.MyService",
            host_settings={"target": "MyProcessName"},
        )
    ]
    processes = [
        ProcessItem(
            "MyProcessName",
            "HelloWorld.MyProcess",
            host_settings={"target": "MyOperationName"},
        )
    ]
    operations = [
        OperationItem("MyOperationName", "HelloWorld.MyOperation")
    ]

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.

The problem

How many times have we migrated an IRIS Instance to another machine, maybe even another version, and after a few days realized we forgot that one SSL Configuration critical for a Business Operations to work? Or maybe a credential, or a lonely class in a package by itself?

The solution

The simple solution is to make a checklist¹. A checklist of the entities we have to move. But simple checklists on Word documents are often forgotten, or just ignored.

On save the ClassMethod:

ClassMethod create() [ Language = python ] {

 print("python") 

}

it has received the error : Compilation started on 06/03/2026 02:15:21 with qualifiers 'cuk /multicompile=0'

 ERROR #7802: Worker job/s '1078:17' unexpectedly shut down in group '#Default:(9119826733444):0'.

 ERROR #7802: Worker job/s '1078:17' unexpectedly shut down in group '#Default:(9119826733444):0'.  

with the compileFlags "cuk" the return is:

ERROR #7802: Worker job/s '1160:34' unexpectedly shut down in group '#Default:(6933525859080):0'.

Hello everyone,

The InterSystems Learning Services Certification Team is pleased to announce the release of the HealthShare Unified Care Record Deployment Specialist Certification exam. The exam is now available for purchase and scheduling in the InterSystems exam catalog.

Welcome to the monthly recap of updates and releases to VS Code and InterSystems-related extensions relevant to IRIS developers. 

Don’t forget, if you’re migrating from InterSystems Studio to VS Code, or want to deepen your knowledge, check out the VS Code training courses from George James Software: georgejames.com/vscode-training. 

This recap covers the four VS Code releases in May: v1.119, v1.120, v1.121, and v1.122.

Editor and navigation

• Quieter inline suggestions (v1.

Hi all,

I'm working on a DICOM router in InterSystems IRIS, based on the workshop-iris-dicom-interop (https://github.com/intersystems-ib/workshop-iris-dicom-interop) example on GitHub. I'm using EnsLib.DICOM.Process to route incoming images to different PACS destinations, where the target system is decided at runtime via a database lookup.

I've run into two issues I'd love some guidance on:

1. Dynamically changing the destination without disrupting transactions

Right now, if I want to send to a new PACS target, I'd need to add a new Business Operation and call

In the previous IoP article, I showed how IoP can expose Python messages to DTL by generating JSON schemas. That is useful when the message is primarily a Python object and we want the IRIS tooling to understand its structure.

This time, the direction is a little different.

Starting with IoP 3.7.1, a PersistentMessage can now be a native IRIS message body class. The Python class is still the source code you write, but the generated IRIS class extends Ens.MessageBody

READY is right around the corner, and this year the Application Services team from InterSystems will be hosting a IPM Users GroupMeeting during the conference!This will be held Wednesday, April 29^th during lunch from 12:30 – 1:30 (lunch will be served at the meeting room).

IPM version 0.10.7 was released on May 29th, 2026. As usual, you can check it out on the GitHub page or through the Community Registry.

Highlighted Features

Utility Scripts iriscli and ipm

IPM is now bundled with two convenience scripts that are runnable from a standard terminal. iriscli launches an interactive IRIS terminal and runs IPM commands directly. These are automatically installed to both ~/.local/bin/ and , so they work inside and outside of containers (Unix/Linux only).

Examples: