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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.

Based on a great sample and workshop built by @Luis Angel Pérez Ramos (see related articles and related Open Exchange app), which included a local InterSystems IRIS for Health container (and desired setup), this sample presented here, adapted the workshop for using the InterSystems Cloud FHIR Server, and it's related setup.

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InterSystems Official
· Mar 27 4m read
2025.1 Modernizing Interoperability User Experience

The Interoperability user interface now includes modernized user experiences for the DTL Editor and Production Configuration applications that are available for opt-in in all interoperability products. You can switch between the modernized and standard views. All other Interoperability screens remain in the Standard user interface. Please note that changes are limited to these two applications and we identify below the functionality that is currently available.

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Digital health solution providers face increasing pressure to integrate complex health data systems while ensuring scalability, security, and compliance with standards like HL7 FHIR. Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) has revolutionized health data exchange by offering a standardized framework that allows diverse health IT systems to communicate effortlessly. But simply adhering to FHIR standards isn’t enough to overcome the intricacies of health data integration. Solution partners must leverage advanced architectural components like FHIR brokers, façades, and repositories to build scalable and efficient solutions. InterSystems offers all the essential features you need to implement FHIR for your health data, whether on-premises, in a public cloud, or as a cloud-based service managed by InterSystems.

Medical Science Hospital Lab Meeting healthcare

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IRIS supports CCDA and FHIR transformations out-of-the-box, yet the ability to access and view those features requires considerable setup time and product knowledge. The IRIS Interop DevTools application was designed to bridge that gap, allowing implementers to immediately jump in and view the built-in transformation capabilities of the product.

In addition to the IRIS XML, XPath, and CCDA Transformation environment, the Interop DevTools package now provides:

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Hi Community,

In this article, I will introduce my application iris-fhir-bridge

IRIS-FHIR-Bridge is a robust interoperability engine built on InterSystems IRIS for Health, designed to transform healthcare data across multiple formats into FHIR and vice versa. It leverages the InterSystems FHIR Object Model (HS.FHIRModel.R4.*) to enable smooth data standardization and exchange across modern and legacy healthcare systems.

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Article
· May 29 8m read
Integrate with Google Forms

Google Forms is the most popular solution on the market for collecting data, answering questionnaires and quizzes. So, it is the ideal solution for collecting patient data and responses in a practical way, without the need to expand or develop systems. In this article, I will detail how to create an account on Google Cloud, register the application that will consume the Google Forms API, generate the service user necessary to consume the API and finally perform actions to create new forms and collect data filled in them in an automated way in embedded Python and IRIS.

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Profiling CCD Documents with LEAD North’s CCD Data Profiler
Ever opened a CCD and been greeted by a wall of tangled XML? You’re not alone. Despite being a core format for clinical data exchange, CCD's are notoriously dense, verbose, and unfriendly to the human eye. For developers and analysts trying to validate their structure or extract meaningful insights, navigating these documents can feel more like archaeology than engineering.

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Template engines are essential for producing customizable dynamic content, without the need for compilation and opening up great possibilities of extensibility for the template user. Especially if the template engine supports Python. A popular solution for template engine is Mko. It is is a template library written in Python. It provides a familiar, non-XML syntax which compiles into Python modules for maximum performance. Mako's syntax and API borrows from the best ideas of many others, including Django and Jinja2 templates, Cheetah, Myghty, and Genshi.

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After we rolled out a new cointainer based on containers.intersystems.com/intersystems/irishealth:2023.1 this week, we suddenly noticed that our FHIR Repository started responding with an Error 500. This turns out to be caused by PROTECT violations on the new HSSYSLOCALTEMP namespace and database used by this version of the IRIS for Health FHIR components.

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Over the past couple of months, I have been working on the SMART on FHIR EHR Launch to test the capabilities of IRIS for Health using two open-source apps from CSIRO: SMART-EHR-Launcher and SMART Forms App. This journey has been incredibly interesting, and I’m truly grateful for the opportunity to work on this task and explore more of IRIS for Health’s potential.

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Introducing Smart Clinical Sidechick — the intelligent, no-drama partner your EHR wishes it could be. She reads FHIR data in real time, interprets lab results without ghosting, and explains clinical alerts like she actually cares. Built with GPT-4 brains and YAML sass, she’s not here to replace your main EHR—just to make it look bad. Tired of irrelevant alerts and cryptic warnings? Sidechick serves up real, explainable insights, not vague “elevated risk” vibes. And when your backend crashes, she doesn’t panic—she self-heals.

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It helps to remove special characters, such as non-utf-8 characters either control characters or unicode characters from text that is not printable or can't be parsed by downstream systems.

There is also $C(32) in this condition; sometimes NBSP appears in the text and it will not be recognized by TIE, but downstream it displays as "?".

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An extension “extends” or enhances a FHIR resource or a data element in a custom way. The extension can be added to the root of a resource, such as “Patient.ethnicity” in US Core profile, and they can be added to individual elements such as HumanName, Address or Identifier.

Did you know that you can also add an extension to a primitive data type?

Primitives usually store a single item and are the most basic element in FHIR. For example: "Keren", false, 1234, 12/08/2024 etc.

For example, the patient resources might look like this:

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RabbitMQ is a message broker that allows producers (those who send a data message) and consumers (those who receive a data message) to establish asynchronous, real-time, and high-performance massive data flows. RabbitMQ supports AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol), an open standard application layer protocol.
The main reasons to employ RabbitMQ include the following:

  • You can improve the performance of the applications using an asynchronous approach.
  • It lets you decouple and reduce dependencies between services, microservices, and applications with the help of a data message mediator, meaning that there is no need for producers and consumers of exchanged data to know each other.
  • It allows the long-running processing of sent data (with the results) to be delivered after utilizing a response queue.
  • It helps you migrate from monolithic to microservices, where microservices exchange data via Rabbit in a decoupled and asynchronous way.
  • It offers reliability and resilience by making it possible for messages to be stored and forwarded. A message can be delivered multiple times until it is processed.
  • Message queueing is the key to scaling your application. As the workload increases, you will only have to add more workers to handle the queues faster.
  • It works well with data streaming applications.
  • It is beneficial for IoT applications.
  • It is a must for Bots’ communication.

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Article
· May 2 3m read
Minify XML in IRIS

In a project I'm working on we need to store some arbitrary XML in the database. This XML does not have any corresponding class in IRIS, we just need to store it as a string (it's relatively small and can fit in a string).
Since there are MANY (millions!) of records in the database I decided to reduce as much as possible the size without compressing. I know that some XML to be stored is indented, some not, it varies.

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One of the challenges of creating a DICOM message is how to implement putting data in the correct place. Part of it is by inserting the data in the specific DICOM tags, while the other is to insert binary data such as a picture - In this article I will explain both.

To create a DICOM message, you can either use the EnsLib.DICOM.File class (to create a DICOM file) or the EnsLib.DICOM.Document class (to create a message that can be sent to PACS directly). In either case, the SetValueAt method will allow you to add your data to the DICOM tags.

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Hi developers!

This will be a very short article as in April 2025 with Lovable and other Prompt-to-UI tools it becomes possible to build the frontend with prompting. Even to the folks like me who is not familiar with modern UI techics at all.

Well, I know at least the words javascript, typescript and ReactJS, so in this very short article we will be building the ReactJS UI to InterSystems FHIR server with Lovable.ai.

Let's go!

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Prefer not to read? Check out the demo video I created:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/-OwOAHC5b3s
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When using standard SQL or the object layer in InterSystems IRIS, metadata consistency is usually maintained through built-in validation and type enforcement. However, legacy systems that bypass these layers—directly accessing globals—can introduce subtle and serious inconsistencies.

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Who hasn't been developing a beautiful example using a Docker IRIS image and had the image generation process fail in the Dockerfile because the license under which the image was created doesn't contain certain privileges?

In my case, what I was deploying in Docker is a small application that uses the Vector data type. With the Community version, this isn't a problem because it already includes Vector Search and vector storage. However, when I changed the IRIS image to a conventional IRIS (the latest-cd), I found that when I built the image, including the classes it had generated, it returned this error:

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I know that people who are completely new to VS Code, Git, Docker, FHIR, and other tools can sometimes struggle with setting up the environment. So I decided to write an article that walks through the entire setup process step by step to make it easier to get started.

I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a comment at the end - let me know if the instructions were clear, if anything was missing, or if there’s anything else you'd find helpful.

The setup includes:

✅ VS Code – Code editor
✅ Git – Version control system
✅ Docker – Runs an instance of IRIS for Health Community
✅ VS Code REST Client Extension – For running FHIR API queries
✅ Python – For writing FHIR-based scripts
✅ Jupyter Notebooks – For AI and FHIR assignments

Before you begin: Ensure you have administrator privileges on your system.

In addition to reading the guide, you can also follow the steps in the videos:

For Windows

https://www.youtube.com/embed/IyvuHbxCwCY
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