Article
· Nov 20, 2023 3m read
Parquet files and InterSystems IRIS

In the world of Big Data, selecting the right file format is crucial for efficient data storage, processing, and analysis. With the massive amount of data generated every day, choosing the appropriate format can greatly impact the speed, cost, and accuracy of data processing tasks. There are several file formats available, each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages, making the decision of which one to use complex. Some of the popular Big Data file formats include CSV, JSON, Avro, ORC, and Parquet.

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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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Article
· Jun 30, 2020 3m read
Replicating Audit Log Near Real Time
Many organisations implement centralised log management systems to separate and centralise the log data in order to e.g. automate threat detection (and response) and to comply with regulatory requirements. The primary systems of interest are the various user facing applications, but increasingly also other kinds of systems including integration platforms.
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A simple production that enables FHIR transaction bundles to be loaded into InterSystems® FHIR® Server via Box and Dropbox. Using the included MFT Connection Components and a 14 liner Custom Business Process, this production will process your transaction bundles to FHIR Resources for immediate consumption with Harry Potter like wizardry. Great for Hackathons, Research and FHIR® Cocktail parties.

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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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Article
· Mar 2, 2024 4m read
IKO - Lessons Learned (Part 1 - Helm)

The IKO documentation is robust. A single web page, that consists of about 50 actual pages of documentation. For beginners that can be a bit overwhelming. As the saying goes: how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Let's start with the first bite: helm.

What is Helm?

Helm is to Kubernetes what the InterSystems Package Manager (IPM, formerly ObjectScript Package Manager - ZPM) is to IRIS.

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When using InterSystems IRIS as an interoperability engine, we all know and love how easy it is to use the Message Viewer to review message traces and see exactly what's going on in your production. When a system is handling millions of messages per day, you may not know exactly where to begin your investigation though.

Over my years supporting IRIS productions, I often find myself investigating things like...

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Background

In 2021, I participated as an InterSystems mentor in a hackathon, where a newcomer to FHIR asked me if there was a tool to transform generic JSON data containing basic patient information into FHIR format. I informed her that I didn't know anything like that, unfortunately.

But that idea stays in my mind...

Several months later, in 2022, I came up with an idea to experiment: to train a named entity recognition (NER) to identify FHIR elements into generic texts. The training involved synthetic FHIR data generated by Synthea and the spaCy Python library.

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In the previous article, we saw different modules in IRIS AI Studio and how it could help explore GenAI capabilities out of IRIS DB seamlessly, even for a non-technical stakeholder. In this article, we will deep dive into "Connectors" module, the one that enables users to seamlessly load data from local or cloud sources (AWS S3, Airtable, Azure Blob) into IRIS DB as vector embeddings, by also configuring embedding settings like model and dimensions.

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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
[This is an embedded link, but you cannot view embedded content directly on the site because you have declined the cookies necessary to access it. To view embedded content, you would need to accept all cookies in your Cookies Settings]

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In the past, reading information from a bar code was limited to a simple alphanumeric code. The creation of a bar code with more than one dimension (2D), especially the QR Code, allowed to increase the amount and variety of data stored in a bar code. While conventional bar codes are capable of storing a maximum of approximately 20 digits, the QR Code is capable of handling several tens to hundreds of times more information. This revolutionized the markets. Now QR codes are everywhere and can be very useful for storing textual, numeric, alphanumeric and even binary data.

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Healthcare interoperability is instrumental in improving patient care, decreasing healthcare provider costs, and providing a more accurate picture to providers. However, with so many different systems, data is formatted in many different ways. There are many standards that have been created to try to solve this problem, including HL7v2, HL7v3, and CDA but each one has its drawbacks.

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Article
· Feb 24, 2023 2m read
InterSystems IRIS in Containers

InterSystems has also released IRIS as containerized deployments. This post is to demonstrate how InterSystems IRIS and applications those rely on IRIS a backend can be packaged into an image and be run in other machines in containers and how simple it is to do that.

A container runs image/s which have all the necessary executables, binary code, libraries, and configuration files. And the images can be moved from one machine to another, and an images repository like Docker Hub can simplify that process.

I have used an application from Open Exchange for this demo.

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InterSystems FAQ rubric

The meaning of each timeout value is as follows.

1. [Server response timeout]

If IRIS/Caché processing (routine or query execution) does not finish within this set time, the browser will return an error.

For example, if this value is 60 seconds and it takes 90 seconds to execute a routine/method/query, an error will occur.

2. [Queued request timeout]

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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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Article
· 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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I've been working for some days in the connectivity between NodeJS client applications and IRIS as server using web sockets.

You can get all the information in relation to the web socket connections using IRIS as a client or as a server from this URL: https://docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls...

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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 have attached a document that describes the product I have developed called NiPaRobotica Pharmacy. This is an interface I developed that accepts Pharmacy Dispense Requests and converts the line items on the order into dispense dialogues which it sends to pharmacy robots. I deployed the interface into 3 Hospital pharmacies two of which had 6 robots that were arranged in such a way that the dispense chutes channelled medications to desks by the pharmacists sitting in windows serving 1200 patients a day. The robots cut the average waiting time from 2 hours down to one hour.

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Released with no formal announcement in IRIS preview release 2019.4 is the /api/monitor service exposing IRIS metrics in Prometheus format. Big news for anyone wanting to use IRIS metrics as part of their monitoring and alerting solution. The API is a component of the new IRIS System Alerting and Monitoring (SAM) solution that will be released in an upcoming version of IRIS.

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InterSystems FAQ rubric

In the sample below, an image file is encoded into a Base64 string in a class property, saved, decoded again with Base64, and restored to another file.

【Usage class】

Class User.test Extends %Persistent
{
Property pics As %GlobalBinaryStream;
}


【When importing】

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I have started working on utilizing Epic on FHIR about a month ago.

Creating a Public Private Key Pair

mkdir /home/ec2-user/path_to_key
openssl genrsa -out ./path_to_key/privatekey.pem 2048

For backend apps, you can export the public key to a base64 encoded X.509 certificate named publickey509.pem using this command...

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