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#InterSystems IRIS for Health

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InterSystems IRIS for Health™ is the world’s first and only data platform engineered specifically for the rapid development of healthcare applications to manage the world’s most critical data. It includes powerful out-of-the-box features: transaction processing and analytics, an extensible healthcare data model, FHIR-based solution development, support for healthcare interoperability standards, and more. All enabling developers to realize value and build breakthrough applications, fast. Learn more.

In this article I'd like to share with you a phenomena that is best you avoid - something you should be aware of when designing your data model (or building your Business Processes) in Caché or in Ensemble (or older HealthShare Health Connect Ensemble-based versions).

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When you first start working with InterSystems IRIS, it’s a common practice to install a system with only a minimum level of security. You have to enter passwords fewer times and this makes it easier to work with development services and web applications when you're first getting acquainted. And, sometimes, minimal security is more convenient for deploying a developed project or solution.
And yet there comes a moment when you need to move your project out of development, into an Internet environment that’s very likely hostile, and it needs to be tested with the maximum security settings (that is, completely locked down) before being deployed to production. And that’s what we’ll discuss in this article.
For more complete coverage of DBMS security issues in InterSystems Caché, Ensemble, and IRIS, you may want to read my other article, Recommendations on installing the InterSystems Caché DBMS for a production environment.
The security system in InterSystems IRIS is based on the concept of applying different security settings for different categories: users, roles, services, resources, privileges, and applications.

Users can be assigned roles. Users and roles can have privileges on resources — databases, services, and applications — with varying read, write, and use rights. Users and roles can also have SQL privileges on the SQL tables located in databases.

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A More Industrial-Looking Global Storage Scheme

In the first article in this series, we looked at the entity–attribute–value (EAV) model in relational databases, and took a look at the pros and cons of storing those entities, attributes and values in tables. We learned that, despite the benefits of this approach in terms of flexibility, there are some real disadvantages, in particular a basic mismatch between the logical structure of the data and its physical storage, which causes various difficulties.

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Keywords: Deep Learning, Grad-CAM, X-Ray, Covid-19, HealthShare, IRIS

Purpose

Over the Easter Weekend I touched on some deep learning classifier for Covid-19 Lungs. The demo result seems fine, seemingly matching some academic research publications around that time on this topic. But is it really "fine "?

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Loading your IRIS Data to your Google Cloud Big Query Data Warehouse and keeping it current can be a hassle with bulky Commercial Third Party Off The Shelf ETL platforms, but made dead simple using the iris2bq utility.

Let's say IRIS is contributing to workload for a Hospital system, routing DICOM images, ingesting HL7 messages, posting FHIR resources, or pushing CCDA's to next provider in a transition of care. Natively, IRIS persists these objects in various stages of the pipeline via the nature of the business processes and anything you included along the way. Lets send that up to Google Big Query to augment and compliment the rest of our Data Warehouse data and ETL (Extract Transform Load) or ELT (Extract Load Transform) to our hearts desire.

A reference architecture diagram may be worth a thousand words, but 3 bullet points may work out a little bit better:

  • It exports the data from IRIS into DataFrames
  • It saves them into GCS as .avro to keep the schema along the data: this will avoid to specify/create the BigQuery table schema beforehands.
  • It starts BigQuery jobs to import those .avro into the respective BigQuery tables you specify.

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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'm always on the lookout for tools that make the development and testing of my interfaces more efficient. A couple of years ago I came across HL7 Spy, from Inner Harbour Software. It quickly became my go-to tool for running message comparison reports for interface engine migrations, message statistics gathering, and troubleshooting message receipt and delivery. It also offered enhanced functionality for things like fetching messages via sftp that other tools don't provide.

I've recently been working with HL7 Spy's author, Jon Reis, to enable support for fetching messages directly from the Ensemble message store. Its SQL Loader feature now has native Caché/IRIS support, and I've contributed a small server-side class to support the extraction of messages using it.

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Hi Developers!

Another way to start using InterSystems ObjectScript Package Manager is to use prebuilt container images of InterSystems IRIS Community Edition and InterSystems IRIS for Health Community Edition.

We deploy this IRIS images on DockerHub and you can run it with the following command:

docker run --rm -p 52773:52773 --init --name my-iris -d intersystemsdc/iris-community:2019.4.0.383.0-zpm

Launch a terminal with:

docker exec -it my-iris iris session IRIS

And install zpm-module as:

USER>zpm 

zpm: USER>install objectscript-math

[objectscript-math] Reload START

[objectscript-math] Reload SUCCESS

[objectscript-math] Module object refreshed.

[objectscript-math] Validate START

[objectscript-math] Validate SUCCESS

[objectscript-math] Compile START

[objectscript-math] Compile SUCCESS

[objectscript-math] Activate START

[objectscript-math] Configure START

[objectscript-math] Configure SUCCESS

[objectscript-math] Activate SUCCESS

zpm: USER>

And use same commands for InterSystems IRIS for Health using the tag: intersystemsdc/irishealth-community:2019.4.0.383.0-zpm

The images are being published on IRIS Community Edition and IRIS Community Edition for Health repositories of Docker Hub.

We will update tags with every new release of IRIS and ZPM.

Happy coding!

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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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Hi Developers!

Recently we published on Docker Hub images for InterSystems IRIS Community Edition and InterSystems IRIS Community for Health containers.

What is that?

There is a repository that publishes it, and in fact, it is the same container IRIS Community Edition containers you have on official InterSystems listing which have the pre-loaded ObjectScript Package Manager (ZPM) client.

So if you run this container with IRIS CE or IRIC CE for Health you can immediately start using ZPM and install packages from Community Registry or any others.

What does this mean for you?

It means, that anyone can deploy any of your InterSystems ObjectScript application in 3 commands:

  • run IRIS container;
  • open terminal;
  • install your application as ZPM package.

It is safe, fast and cross-platform.

It's really handy if you want to test a new interesting ZPM package and not harm any of your systems.

Suppose, you have docker-desktop installed. You can run the image, which wiil pull the latest container if you don't have it locally:

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Hi Developers!

Many of you are looking for samples on how to work with InterSystems IRIS Analytics, formerly known as DeepSee.

There is a Samples BI module with Patients and Holefoods examples which is available on Github with source code. The installation steps are clear but take time.

Recently we added the option to run IRIS Community Edition containers with ObjectScript Package Manager (ZPM) on board. This simplifies the installation to the "run-one-command" step for the modules submitted to ZPM Community Registry. And thus we can benefit the Samples BI installation with ZPM.

And here is how you can run it on your laptop. Let's go!

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¡Hi everybody!

As you likely are aware, the new version of InterSystems IRIS for Health (I4H) it's already available in Docker Hub. It's the Community version and is free and fully functional. There have been comments about it in other articles and posts,... so today I won't add anything about features. Here I want to explore "the mistery about the disappearance, or better, absence of our persistent data when we run a container with the durable option" (I didn't find a terrifying font to emphasize the thriller... post editor is not terrific for styling smiley ) .

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Some time ago I developed an application that tackled a familarial problem faced by many developers when required to update multiple UAT or PRODUCTION sites with the latest Software patches that have been developed and tested on your DEV server and now need to be deployed to multiple sites running that software.

In principle the solution works as follows:

1) Prepare an XML export of affected classes/routines/csp pages/hl7 definitions et al

2) Optionally create a global export of any new globals or changes to existing globals

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Database systems have very specific backup requirements that in enterprise deployments require forethought and planning. For database systems, the operational goal of a backup solution is to create a copy of the data in a state that is equivalent to when application is shut down gracefully. Application consistent backups meet these requirements and Caché provides a set of APIs that facilitate the integration with external solutions to achieve this level of backup consistency.

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Article
Alberto Fuentes · Oct 23, 2019 2m read
Unit Tests for Data Transforms

Would you like to be sure your data transforms work as expected with a single command? And what about writing unit tests for your data transforms in a quick and simple way?

When talking about interoperability, there are usually a lot of data transforms involved. Those data transforms are used to convert data between different systems or applications in your code, so they are running a very important job.

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Every developer has made the mistake of accidentally leaving temporary debug code in place when they meant to remove it after debugging is complete. The great thing about writing in ObjectScript is that there is a way to make temporary code be truly temporary and automatically self-destruct! This can also be done in such a way that the code has no change of making it into your source control stream, which can be helpful as well.

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Here is an ObjectScript snippet which lets to create database, namespace and a web application for InterSystems IRIS:

    set currentNS = $namespace

    zn "%SYS"

    write "Create DB ...",!
    set dbName="testDB"
    set dbProperties("Directory") = "/InterSystems/IRIS/mgr/testDB"
    set status=##Class(Config.Databases).Create(dbName,.dbProperties)
    write:'status $system.Status.DisplayError(status)
    write "DB """_dbName_""" was created!",!!


    write "Create namespace ...",!
    set nsName="testNS"
    //DB for globals
    set nsProperties("Globals") = dbName
    //DB for routines
    set nsProperties("Routines") = dbName
    set status=##Class(Config.Namespaces).Create(nsName,.nsProperties)
    write:'status $system.Status.DisplayError(status)
    write "Namespace """_nsName_""" was created!",!!


    write "Create web application ...",!
    set webName = "/csp/testApplication"
    set webProperties("NameSpace") = nsName
    set webProperties("Enabled") = $$$YES
    set webProperties("IsNameSpaceDefault") = $$$YES
    set webProperties("CSPZENEnabled") = $$$YES
    set webProperties("DeepSeeEnabled") = $$$YES
    set webProperties("AutheEnabled") = $$$AutheCache
    set status = ##class(Security.Applications).Create(webName, .webProperties)
    write:'status $system.Status.DisplayError(status)
    write "Web application """webName""" was created!",!

    zn currentNS

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This week I am going to look at CPU, one of the primary hardware food groups :) A customer asked me to advise on the following scenario; Their production servers are approaching end of life and its time for a hardware refresh. They are also thinking of consolidating servers by virtualising and want to right-size capacity either bare-metal or virtualized. Today we will look at CPU, in later posts I will explain the approach for right-sizing other key food groups - memory and IO.

So the questions are:

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Article
Guillaume Rongier · Jul 4, 2019 1m read
Install EnsDemo on IRIS

Has you may know, EnsDemo from Ensemble are not available anymore on IRIS.

This is a good thing, Iris is cloud oriented, it must be light, fast. Now the new way of sharing samples or modules is through git, continuous integration and OpenExchange.

But, in some cases you want to go back to your good old samples from EnsDemo to get inspiration or best practices.

Good news, there is a git for that :

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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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The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud provides a broad set of infrastructure services, such as compute resources, storage options, and networking that are delivered as a utility: on-demand, available in seconds, with pay-as-you-go pricing. New services can be provisioned quickly, without upfront capital expense. This allows enterprises, start-ups, small and medium-sized businesses, and customers in the public sector to access the building blocks they need to respond quickly to changing business requirements.

Updated: 10-Jan, 2023

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In the last post we scheduled 24-hour collections of performance metrics using pButtons. In this post we are going to be looking at a few of the key metrics that are being collected and how they relate to the underlying system hardware. We will also start to explore the relationship between Caché (or any of the InterSystems Data Platforms) metrics and system metrics. And how you can use these metrics to understand the daily beat rate of your systems and diagnose performance problems.

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I am often asked by customers, vendors or internal teams to explain CPU capacity planning for large production databases running on VMware vSphere.

In summary there are a few simple best practices to follow for sizing CPU for large production databases:

  • Plan for one vCPU per physical CPU core.
  • Consider NUMA and ideally size VMs to keep CPU and memory local to a NUMA node.
  • Right-size virtual machines. Add vCPUs only when needed.

Generally this leads to a couple of common questions:

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This post will show you an approach to size shared memory requirements for database applications running on InterSystems data platforms including global and routine buffers, gmheap, and locksize as well as some performance tips you should consider when configuring servers and when virtualizing Caché applications. As ever when I talk about Caché I mean all the data platform (Ensemble, HealthShare, iKnow and Caché).

A list of other posts in this series is here

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One of the great availability and scaling features of Caché is Enterprise Cache Protocol (ECP). With consideration during application development distributed processing using ECP allows a scale out architecture for Caché applications. Application processing can scale to very high rates from a single application server to the processing power of up to 255 application servers with no application changes.

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