Article
· Nov 29, 2022 6m read
What's HL7v2?!

HL7 (Health Level 7) is a set of technical specifications for computerized exchanges of clinical, financial and administrative data between hospital information systems (HIS). These specifications are variously integrated into the corpus of formal American (ANSI) and international (ISO) standards.

The L7 of HL7 indicates that it is a standard that operates at layer 7, in other words at the application layer, of the OSI model. This means that HL7 does not have to take into account exchange security considerations, or those of message transport (this being ensured by lower-level layers such as SSL/TLS for security or TCP for the transport of data for example). To be more precise, layer 7 supports communications for end-user processes and applications and the presentation of data for user-facing software applications. As the highest layer of the OSI model, and the closest to the end user, layer 7 provides application-specific functions such as identifying communication partners and the quality of service between them, determining resource availability, considering privacy and user authentication, and synchronizing communication, as well as connecting the application to the lower levels of the OSI model.

Returning to the HL7 standard, the HL7 version 2 standard (also known as Pipehat) was originally created in 1989 but is still being used and updated regularly, resulting in versions 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.3.1, 2.4, 2.5, 2.5.1, 2.6, 2.7, 2.7.1, 2.8, 2.8.1, 2.8.2 and 2.9. The v2.x standards are backward compatible (e.g., a message based on version 2.3 will be understood by an application that supports version 2.6) and in higher versions, you will see some fields are left just for it.

Despite it being more than 30 years old, HL7v2 remains the most widely used healthcare interface standard by a large margin according to the HL7.org portal that tells that:

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Article
· Oct 24, 2022 10m read
PerfTools IO Test Suite

Purpose

This set of tools (RanRead, RanWrite, and the combined RanIO) is used to generate random read and write events within a database (or pair of databases) to test the IO speed of IRIS running on a specified hardware setup. While Read operations can be measured in the usual Input/Output operations per second (IOPS) since they're direct disk reads, write events are sent to the database and thus their physical writes are managed by IRIS's write daemon.

Results gathered from the IO tests will vary from configuration to configuration based on the IO sub-system. Before running these tests, ensure corresponding operating system and storage level monitoring are configured to capture IO performance metrics for later analysis. The suggested method is by running the System Performance tool that comes bundled within IRIS. Please note that this is an update to a previous release, which can be found here.

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Overview

We often run into connectivity problems with HealthShare (HS) deployments in Microsoft Azure that have multiple HealthShare components (instances or namespaces) installed on the same VM, especially when needing to communicate to other HS components while using the Azure Load Balancer (ILB) to provide mirror VIP functionality. Details on how and why a load balancer is used with database mirroring can be found this community article.

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Deploying InterSystems HealthShare code, supporting lookups and artifacts like ssl certs, keys etc is relatively straight forward using Gitlab Runners. Not only does this approach enable managing the code base and deploying with git type workflows, but it also lends to a speedy recovery and repeatable environments for some implementations.

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Article
· Jul 27, 2021 2m read
IRIS Interoperability Message Bank

I heard about Message Bank when we started redesigning a Health Connect production to run in containers in the cloud. Since there will be multiple IRIS containers, we were directed to utilize Message Bank as one place to view messages and logs from all containers.

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Hey everyone!

I recently learnt something new while working with WRC on an issue, and I wanted to share with everyone on the off chance it could help someone else.

Scenario:

Files are being inexplicably written to a folder on your server and, due to the number of files in the folder and general system throughput, it is not possible to work through the files to track down the source.

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Artificial intelligence has solved countless human challenges – and medical coding might be next.
As organizations prepare for ICD-11, medical coding is about to become more complicated. Healthcare organizations in the United States already manage 140,000+ codes in ICD-10. With ICD-11, that number will rise.
Some propose artificial intelligence as a solution. AI could aid computer-based medical coding systems, identifying errors, enhancing patient care, and optimizing revenue cycles, among other benefits.

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My team is working on redesigning an Interoperability solution that currently runs on a HealthShare server that is part of a mirror. Most of the messages are delimited records processed using Complex Record Mapping. We were told to utilize cloud services available in AWS, use containers, autoscaling…

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Updated Jan 19th, 2023.

Hi all,

I want to share a quick little method you can use to enable ssl with a self signed certificate on your local development instance of IRIS/HealthShare. This enables you to test https-specific features such as OAuth without a huge lift.

1. Install OpenSSL

Windows     : Download from https://www.openssl.org or other built OpenSSL Binary. 

Debian Linux: $ sudo apt-get -y install openssl

RHEL        : $ sudo yum install openssl
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Article
· May 15, 2020 3m read
Debugging in HealthShare

Hi, if you develop production with HealthShare, you may have noticed there is a nice tracing feature available - HS.Util.Trace.Operations. This feature allows visually tracing debug information, in structured way. It complements good old logging macros like $$$LOGINFO, $$$TRACE and alike.

I use this feature a lot. However, it has limited functionality, it works nice with classes that extend XML Adapter, streams or data types, but it doesn't work well with arbitrary objects that do no extend from XML Adapter.

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While reviewing our documentation for our ^pButtons (in IRIS renamed as ^SystemPerformance) performance monitoring utility, a customer told me: "I understand all of this, but I wish it could be simpler… easier to define profiles, manage them etc.".

After this session I thought it would be a nice exercise to try and provide some easier human interface for this.

The first step in this was to wrap a class-based API to the existing pButtons routine.

I was also able to add some more "features" like showing what profiles are currently running, their time remaining to run, previously running processes and more.

The next step was to add on top of this API, a REST API class.

With this artifact (a pButtons REST API) in hand, one can go ahead and build a modern UI on top of that.

For example -

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InterSystems and Intel recently conducted a series of benchmarks combining InterSystems IRIS with 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, also known as “Cascade Lake”, and Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory (DCPMM). The goals of these benchmarks are to demonstrate the performance and scalability capabilities of InterSystems IRIS with Intel’s latest server technologies in various workload settings and server configurations. Along with various benchmark results, three different use-cases of Intel DCPMM with InterSystems IRIS are provided in this report.

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I was searching for the most simple way to connect from visual studio code to my local instance via terminal without having to change any window.

I know this can also be achieved via telnet but seems a bit overhead if you're in your local machine.

For me the simplest sollution is to open a terminal window in VS Code, navigate to the /bin folder of your instance installation and run .\csession.exe INSTANCENAME

For simplicity you can just include your /bin folder in your path so you don't even need to navigate there

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Article
· Jul 25, 2019 1m read
Disabling an Ensemble Production

I'm not saying that this is in anyway "best practices," but I'm in a peculiar situation where I need to restrict users from starting a "retired" Ensemble Production in a namespace that's been renamed. It's still an "Ensemble-activated" namespace; we need to keep it available for Ensemble Message Viewer access ... fortunately, only for a little while.

It's a bit of a hack ...

Open the Production class in Studio and add the following classmethod:

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This is more for my memory that anything else but I thought I'd share it because it often comes up in comments, but is not in the InterSystems documentation.

There is a wonderful utility called ^REDEBUG that increases the level of logging going into mgr\cconsole.log.

You activate it by

a) start terminal/login

b) zn "%SYS"

c) do ^REDEBUG

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1. Purpose

This is a 10-minute simple step-by-step guide on how to quickly set up various flavors of HealthShare docker containers from scratch on a Win10 laptop.

For example, we can build a couple of HealthShare "global edition vs UK Edition" demos as shown below.

There are a couple of frequently asked questions from HealthShare colleagues and partners:

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Keywords: Jupyter Notebook, Tensorflow GPU, Keras, Deep Learning, MLP, and HealthShare

1. Purpose and Objectives

In previous"Part I" we have set up a deep learning demo environment. In this "Part II" we will test what we could do with it.

Many people at my age had started with the classic MLP (Multi-Layer Perceptron) model. It is intuitive hence conceptually easier to start with.

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Keywords: Anaconda, Jupyter Notebook, Tensorflow GPU, Deep Learning, Python 3 and HealthShare

1. Purpose and Objectives

This "Part I" is a quick record on how to set up a "simple" but popular deep learning demo environment step-by-step with a Python 3 binding to a HealthShare 2017.2.1 instance . I used a Win10 laptop at hand, but the approach works the same on MacOS and Linux.

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