Hi Community!

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new, hands-on training program:

 🧑‍💻 Developing FHIR Applications Using Python 🧑‍💻

This cohort-based course takes developers from FHIR fundamentals to advanced, real-world healthcare interoperability solutions, with deeper, more practical coverage than typical industry offerings and a strong focus on production-ready skills using InterSystems technology.

Introduction

In my previous article, I introduced the FHIR Data Explorer, a proof-of-concept application that connects InterSystems IRIS, Python, and Ollama to enable semantic search and visualization over healthcare data in FHIR format, a project currently participating in the InterSystems External Language Contest.

In this follow-up, we’ll see how I integrated Ollama for generating patient history summaries directly from structured FHIR data stored in IRIS, using lightweight local language models (LLMs) such as Llama 3.2:1B or Gemma 2:2B.

The goal was to build a completely local AI pipeline that can extract, format, and narrate patient histories while keeping data private and under full control.

All patient data used in this demo comes from FHIR bundles, which were parsed and loaded into IRIS via the IRIStool module. This approach makes it straightforward to query, transform, and vectorize healthcare data using familiar pandas operations in Python. If you’re curious about how I built this integration, check out my previous article Building a FHIR Vector Repository with InterSystems IRIS and Python through the IRIStool module.

Both IRIStool and FHIR Data Explorer are available on the InterSystems Open Exchange — and part of my contest submissions. If you find them useful, please consider voting for them!

• IRIStool and Data Manager
• FHIR Data Explorer

Sending emails is a common requirement in integration scenarios — whether for client reminders, automatic reports, or transaction confirmations. Static messages quickly become hard to maintain and personalize. This is where the templated_email module comes in, combining InterSystems IRIS Interoperability with the power of Jinja2 templates.

Why Jinja2 for Emails

Jinja2 is a popular templating engine from the Python ecosystem that enables fully dynamic content generation.

Hey Community,

Enjoy the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ A Day in the Life of a Developer - Data Platforms Roundup @ Ready 2025

I was wondering what best practice was for using macros in Embedded Python, i.e. iris.execute('$$$MACRO()') or something else. Does anyone have insight into this?

Introduction

In a previous article, I presented the IRIStool module, which seamlessly integrates the pandas Python library with the IRIS database. Now, I'm explaining how we can use IRIStool to leverage InterSystems IRIS as a foundation for intelligent, semantic search over healthcare data in FHIR format.

This article covers what I did to create the database for another of my projects, the FHIR Data Explorer. Both projects are candidates in the current InterSystems contest, so please vote for them if you find them useful.

You can find them at the Open Exchange:

• IRIStool and Data Manager
• FHIR Data Explorer

In this article we'll cover:

• Connecting to InterSystems IRIS database through Python
• Creating a FHIR-ready database schema
• Importing FHIR data with vector embeddings for semantic search

Hi,

When we open a terminal in IRIS, we are entering the ObjectScript shell. Within this shell, we can execute IRIS commands, such as:

In other words, the ObjectScript command is executed in the current shell. But it's always good to remember that IRIS has other shells

• SQL
• Python
• TSQL
• MDX

One very interesting aspect is shortcuts. We can access these shells through their calls or via shortcuts, as shown in the table below:

Embeddedpy-bridge: A Toolkit for Embedded Python

Overview

Embedded Python is a game-changer for InterSystems IRIS, offering access to the vast Python ecosystem directly within the database. However, bridging the gap between ObjectScript and Python can sometimes feel like translating between two different worlds.

To make this transition seamless using embeddedpy-bridge.

This package is a developer-centric utility kit designed to provide high-level ObjectScript wrappers, familiar syntax, and robust error handling for Embedded Python.

I am trying to add Plotly Bar graph in a div to a CSPpage. I am working in IRIS 2022.1. I created persistent class.

I copied relevant code into github repo:

oliverwilms/iris-python-plotly
 

iris-python-plotly/csp/otwPlotly.csp at master · oliverwilms/iris-python-plotly
 

Set tPlotlyDiv = ##class(dc.python.test).PlotlyDiv(trnYear,trnMonth)

ClassMethod PlotlyDiv(pTrnYear = 2025, pTrnMonth = 8) As %String
{
    Set importlib = ##class(%SYS.Python).Import("importlib")
    Set plotdiv = ##class(%SYS.Python).Import("plotdiv")
    Do importlib.reload(plotdiv)
    Set div = plotdiv.

I have a custom Buffer class which is designed to capture written/printed statements to the device, to be able to transform the captured text to string or stream type. I have used this in ObjectScript to capture ObjectScript write statements and return a string. I would like to try to use this with a [ Language = python ] method as follows. This class will be called by a scheduled task.

/// ObjectScript code which initializes buffer to capture statements written in nested method call
ClassMethod CollectStringFromBuffer() 
{
    set buffer = ##class(CustomClass.Buffer).%New()
    do buffer.

The Rut

Up until early this year, I haven't been not doing much coding at all -- I had gotten sick of it.

After many years as a hands-on software engineer and data scientist, I got burned out around 2015. I switched to business development roles focused on "external innovation," then joined InterSystems in 2019 as a product manager. I missed the creative aspects of coding, but not the tedium. The endless cycle of boilerplate, debugging, and context-switching had left me creatively depleted.

It's about an example for the External Languages Contest 2025

You get almost any information about your databases in IRIS using 
the System Management Portal. After passing several levels, you often
get a wide list of items, but the interesting ones are hard to find.

Interested in sharing your thoughts? Sign up to participate here.

I cloned iris-rag-demo from Open Exchange and issued docker-compose up -d. I went to the front end and type in the chat message:

Who was the 46th President of United States of America?

I got a run time error:

RuntimeError: ERROR <Ens>ErrBPTerminated: Terminating BP ChatProcess # due to error: ERROR #5002: ObjectScript error: <PYTHON EXCEPTION> *<class 'RuntimeError'>: <PYTHON EXCEPTION> <class 'ValueError' > ERROR #5002: ObjectScript error: <PYTHON EXCEPTION> *<class 'RuntimeError'

Traceback:

File "/irisdev/app/src/python/rag/app.py", line 28, in process_input agent_text = _service.

Here are the technology bonuses for the InterSystems Full Stack Contest 2026, which will give you extra points in the voting:

• IRIS Vector Search usage -3
• InterSystems Native SDK for Python or Embedded Python usage -3
• Developer Community Idea implemented - 2
• Docker container usage -2 
• IPM Package Deployment - 2
• Online Demo -2 
• Find and report a bug - 2
• Article on Developer Community - 2
• The second article on Developer Community - 1
• Video on YouTube - 3
• YouTube Short - 1
• First Time Contribution - 3

See the details below.

How to Build Applications with LangGraph: A Step-by-Step Guide

Tags: #LangGraph #LangChain #AI #Agents #Python #LLM #StateManagement #Workflows

Hi everyone, I want to tell you a little about LangGraph, a tool that I'm studying and developing.

Basically traditional AI applications often face challenges when dealing with complex workflows and dynamic states. LangGraph offers a robust solution, enabling the creation of stateful agents that can manage complex conversations, make context-based decisions, and execute sophisticated workflows.

Hi Community,

Are you a Python developer? If so, you can already start building apps with InterSystems IRIS without learning a new programming language!

👨‍💻Try this exercise to get started quickly with using Python's familiar DB-API interface to connect to an InterSystems IRIS database and run SQL queries.

💬What was your experience with the exercise? Let me know in the comments!

These are the strategic plans of my example for the External Languages Contest 2025

Hey Community,

We're happy to invite you to a LinkedIn Live session in Dutch

🎤 Data exchange in healthcare according to the FHIR standard with Python 🎤

Event details:
📅 Date: Thursday, November 27th
🕓 Time: 1:30-2:15 PM EST

Hey Community!

We're happy to share the next video in the "Code to Care" series on our InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯  Chaining LLMs for Better Results using Agentic AI

While working with external languages for IRIS (such as Python and Node.js), one of the first things you must accomplish is making a connection to an IRIS instance.

For instance, to make a connection in python (from https://pypi.org/project/intersystems-irispython/):

import iris

# Open a connection to the server
args = {
	'hostname':'127.0.0.1', 
	'port': 1972,
	'namespace':'USER', 
	'username':'username', 
	'password':'password'
}
conn = iris.connect(**args)

# Create an iris object
irispy = iris.createIRIS(conn)

# Create a global array in the USER namespace on the server
irispy.

Hey Community!

We're happy to share a new video from our InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯  Python Interoperability Productions @ Ready 2025

How to set up RAG for OpenAI agents using IRIS Vector DB in Python

In this article, I’ll walk you through an example of using InterSystems IRIS Vector DB to store embeddings and integrate them with an OpenAI agent.

To demonstrate this, we’ll create an OpenAI agent with knowledge of InterSystems technology. We’ll achieve this by storing embeddings of some InterSystems documentation in IRIS and then using IRIS vector search to retrieve relevant content—enabling a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflow.

Note: Section 1 details how process text into embeddings.

Vector search is a retrieval method that converts text, images, audio, and other data into numeric vectors using an AI model, and then searches for items that are semantically close. It enables “semantic similarity search” from free text, which is difficult with keyword search alone.

However, in real use, I encountered cases where results that are “close in meaning” but logically the opposite appeared near the top of the search results.

This is a serious issue in situations where affirmation vs. negation matters. If the system returns the wrong answer, the impact can be significant, so we cannot ignore this problem.

This article does not propose a new algorithm. I wrote it to share a practical way I found useful when semantic search fails due to negation.

Ever since I started using IRIS, I have wondered if we could create agents on IRIS. It seemed obvious: we have an Interoperability GUI that can trace messages, we have an underlying object database that can store SQL, Vectors and even Base64 images. We currently have a Python SDK that allows us to interface with the platform using Python, but not particularly optimized for developing agentic workflows. This was my attempt to create a Python SDK that can leverage several parts of IRIS to support development of agentic systems.

1-command only required for an entire IRIS instance for Data Science projects, and leveraging this to compare query methods' speed (Dynamic SQL, Pandas Query, and Globals).

Before joining InterSystems, I worked in a team of web developers as a data scientist. Most of my day-to-day work involved training and embedding ML models in Python-based backend applications through microservices, mainly built with the Django framework and using Postgres SQL for sourcing the data.

Introduction

Earlier this year, I set about creating kit to introduce young techy folk at a Health Tech hackathon to using InterSystems IRIS for health, particularly focusing on using FHIR and vector search.

I wanted to publish this to the developer community because the tutorials included in the kit make a great introduction to using FHIR and to building a basic RAG system in IRIS.