One objective of vectorization is to render unstructured text more machine-usable. Vector embeddings accomplish this by encoding the semantics of text as high-dimensional numeric vectors, which can be employed by advanced search algorithms (normally an approximate nearest neighbor algorithm like Hierarchical Navigable Small World). This not only improves our ability to interact with unstructured text programmatically but makes it searchable by context and by meaning beyond what is captured literally by keyword.

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. Its an all inclusive set of tutorials to show in detail how to:

Hi, Community!

Ready to strengthen your deployment of InterSystems IRIS® data platform?

👨‍💻See how to configure a mirrored pair to preserve the integrity of your data:

Setting Up a Mirrored Pair with Configuration Merge

Project Overview / Introduction

Developing and testing REST APIs in InterSystems IRIS often requires a significant amount of boilerplate code. While ObjectScript provides powerful tools for building APIs, writing consistent and repeatable tests can be time‑consuming. This is where IrisOASTestGen comes in.

Updated 12/09/25

Hi Community,

You can unlock the full potential of InterSystems IRIS—and help your team onboard—with the full range of InterSystems learning resources offered online and in person, for every role in your organization. Developers, system administrators, data analysts, and integrators can quickly get up to speed.

Onboarding Resources for Every Role

Developers

• Online Program: Getting Started with InterSystems IRIS for Coders(21h)
• Classroom Training:
  • Developing with InterSystems Objects and SQL(5 days)
  • Developing System Integrations (5 days) 

System Administrators

Updated 12/09/25

Hi Community,

Need to find the most relevant onboarding for your HealthShare Unified Care Record® team? Maximize your team's knowledge and success by diving into this curated list of offerings from InterSystems Learning Services—which includes online and in-person training for a variety of roles in your organization.

Onboarding Resources for Every Role

System Integrators

Does your blood run cold when you hear about openEHR? Do archetypes give you goosebumps?

Overcome your fears with this article and master OpenEHR using the capabilities of InterSystems IRIS for Health!

What is openEHR?

openEHR is an open, vendor-neutral specification designed to represent, store, and exchange clinical information in a semantically rich and long-term sustainable way. Instead of defining fixed message structures (as many interoperability standards do) OpenEHR separates clinical knowledge from technical implementation through a multi-layered modelling approach.

Hello Community,

Great news for developers who have just started working with InterSystems IRIS! We have hands‑on interactive tutorials available via the Instruqt platform! These are perfect for getting up to speed quickly, playing in real environments, and building confidence with IRIS‑based development.

Here is the list of available tutorials:

• Full Stack Tutorial - Experience how IRIS supports full-stack system architecture. 
• InterSystems Interoperability - Explore IRIS interoperability tools for connecting and integrating systems. 
• IRIS for Health Interoperability - Learn to use IRIS for Health features in application integration with data from an EHR (Electronic Health Record). 
• REST + Angular Application - Practice building applications with IRIS REST services. 
• RAG using IRIS Vector Search - Discover IRIS Vector Search capabilities for AI-powered applications. 

In today’s healthcare data landscape, FHIR has become the standard for structured clinical data exchange. However, while FHIR excels at interoperability, its JSON format makes analytics challenging—including FHIR QuestionnaireResponse.

Three Steps to Build It

1. Design and Collect the Questionnaire

When I started my journey with InterSystems IRIS, especially in Interoperability, one of the initial and common questions I had was: how can I run something on an interval or schedule? In this topic, I want to share two simple classes that address this issue. I'm surprised that some similar classes are not located somewhere in EnsLib. Or maybe I didn't search well? Anyway, this topic is not meant to be complex work, just a couple of snippets for beginners.

I was facing the same issue as Jerry faced when connecting IRIS to SQL server. My ODBC connection is configured to authenticate via windows authentication.

Configure IRIS ODBC connection with Windows authentication using a
 

How I fixed it for myself?

Root cause

I am truly excited to continue my "InterSystems for Dummies" series of articles, and today, we want to tell you everything about one of the most powerful features we have for interoperability.

Hey, even if you have already had a go, we plan to take a really close look at how to get the most out of them and make our production even better.

Hi Community,

We’re excited to share a brand-new Instruqt tutorial: 

🧑‍🏫 RAG using InterSystems IRIS Vector Search

This hands-on lab walks you through building a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) AI chatbot powered by InterSystems IRIS Vector Search. You’ll see how vector search can be leveraged to deliver up-to-date and accurate responses, combining the strengths of IRIS with generative AI.

✨ Why try it?

Introduction

HL7 messages often contain multiple repeating segments such as NTE, AL1, OBX, ZTX, DG1, and others. These segments sometimes require individual processing and routing to different downstream systems. This technical paper introduces a configurable template designed to automate the splitting of these repeating HL7 segments, improving message handling and integration efficiency.

In this tutorial, I will discuss how can you connect your IRIS data platform to sql server db  .

Prereq: 

• Have ODBC driver installed in your device. You can download it from here: Download ODBC Driver for SQL Server - ODBC Driver for SQL Server | Microsoft Learn. 
• Have SQL Server and IRIS installed in your device
• Have SQL Server connection Authentication enabled in SQL server

I am struggling in understanding how FDN works within Health Share, in particular those that are related to Provider Directory within Health Share. Does anyone have examples of using FDN that they would be able share?

I have been walking through this with a few team members and as such I thought there might be others out there who could use it, especially if you work with HL7 & Ensemble/HealthConnect/HealthShare and never venture out past the Interoperability section. 

First, I would like to establish that this is an extension of the already established documentation on importing and exporting SQL data found here: https://docs.intersystems.com/iris20241/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=GSQL_impexp#GSQL_impexp_import

Hey folks! Having recently onboarded to InterSystems, I realized that despite having a totally free and awesome Community Edition, it's not super clear how to get it. I decided to write up a guide highlighting all the different ways you can access the Community Edition of InterSystems IRIS:

Get InterSystems IRIS Community Edition as a Container

Working with a containerized instance of the Community Edition is the recommended approach for folks who are new to developing on InterSystems IRIS, and in my opinion it's the most straightforward. InterSystems IRIS Community Edition can be found on DockerHub; if you have an InterSystems SSO account, you can also find it in the InterSystems Container Registry.

In either case, you'll want to pull the image you want using the docker CLI:

docker pull intersystems/iris-community:latest-em
// or
docker pull containers.intersystems.com/intersystems/iris-community:latest-em

Next, you'll need to start the container: In order to interact with IRIS from outside the container (for example, to use the management portal) you'll need to publish some ports. The following command will run the IRIS Community Edition container with the superserver and web server ports published; note that you can't have anything else running that depends on ports 1972 or 52773!

docker run --name iris -d --publish 1972:1972 --publish 52773:52773 intersystems/iris-community:latest-em

Interoperability on Python (IoP) is a proof-of-concept project designed to showcase the power of the InterSystems IRIS Interoperability Framework when combined with a Python-first approach.IoP leverages Embedded Python (a feature of InterSystems IRIS) to enable developers to write interoperability components in Python, which can seamlessly integrate with the robust IRIS platform. This guide has been crafted for beginners and provides a comprehensive introduction to IoP, its setup, and practical steps to create your first interoperability component. By the end of this article, you will get a clear understanding of how to use IoP to build scalable, Python-based interoperability solutions.

SQLTools is a Visual Studio Code (VS Code) Extension with over 3.5 million downloads that provides connections to many of the most used databases, including InterSystems IRIS, using drivers. For developers new to VS Code, or those already familiar with it but are looking to streamline their connections to InterSystems IRIS, this tutorial will take you through installing the SQLTools extensions and the InterSystems IRIS drive. It then guides you on how to establish a connection to your instance of InterSystems IRIS and run a query. You will need: VS Code installed on your system and access to

InterSystems IRIS has quite a few different kinds properties. Let’s put them in order so that they make better sense.

First of all, I would divide them into categories:

• Atomic or simple properties (all those %String, %Integer, %Data and other system or user datatypes)
• References to stored objects
• Built-in objects
• Streams (both binary and character)
• Collections (which are divided into arrays and lists)
• Relationships (one-many and parent-children)

Some of these kinds of properties are quite straightforward. For example, atomic properties:

Property Name As %Name;Property DoB As %DateProperty Age As %Integer

Hi, Community!

Ready to go beyond built-in utility functions in your HealthShare® Health Connect Cloud™ integrations?

👉 Learn how to Add Custom Utility Functions in Health Connect Cloud!

Foreword

InterSystems IRIS versions 2022.2 and newer feature the ability to authenticate to a REST API using JSON web tokens (JWTs). This feature enhances security by limiting where and how often passwords transfer over the network in addition to setting an expiration time on access.

The goal of this article is to serve as a tutorial on how to implement a mock REST API using InterSystems IRIS and lock access to it behind JWTs.

Hi community,

The aim of this article is to explain how to create messaging between IRIS and Microsoft Teams.

In my company, we wanted to monitor error messages, and we used the Ens.Alert class to redirect those error messages through a Business Operation that sent an email.
The problem was that we sent those error messages to a support account where there were many emails. We wanted something specific for a specific team.

So we investigated how to make these messages reach the development team directly and they could have, in real time, a notification of an error in our production.
In our company we use Microsoft Teams as a corporate tool, so we asked ourselves: How could we make these messages reach the IRIS development team?

Hi, Community!

Do you have HL7® V2 messages that you need to convert to the HL7® FHIR® format for better integration and analysis? See how the InterSystems FHIR Transformation Service can help:

Using the FHIR Transformation Service with AWS HealthLake

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Hi, Community!

Looking to modernize the way you build interoperability screens in InterSystems® products? Take a tour of some recent UI improvements.

Building Integrations: A New User Experience

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is getting a lot of attention lately because it can change many areas of our lives. Better computer power and more data have helped AI do amazing things, like improving medical tests and making self-driving cars. AI can also help businesses make better decisions and work more efficiently, which is why it's becoming more popular and widely used. How can one integrate the OpenAI API calls into an existing IRIS Interoperability application?

One of the pain points for maintaining HL7 interfaces is the need to run a reliable regression test upon deployment to new environments and after upgrades. The %UnitTest class allows unit tests to be created and packaged alongside interface code. Test data can also be maintained within the unit test class, allowing for quick and easily repeatable smoke-testing and regression testing.

##Resources:

What I find really useful about IRIS when teaching my subject of Postrelational databases is the fact that it is a multi model database. Which means that I can actually go into architecture and structure and all that only once but then show the usage of different models (like object, document, hierarchy) using the same language and approach. And it is not a huge leap to go from an object oriented programming language (like C#, Java etc) to an object oriented database.

However, along with advantages (which are many) come some drawbacks when we switch from object oriented model to relational. When I say that you can get access to the same data using different models I need to also explain how it is possible to work with lists and arrays from object model in relational table. With arrays it is very simple - by default they are represented as separate tables and that's the end of it. With lists - it's harder because by default it's a string. But one still wants to do something about it without damaging the structure and making this list unreadable in the object model.

So in this article I will showcase a couple of predicates and a function that are useful when working with lists, and not just as fields.

Hello interface engineers and app developers,     

Did you know that you can use Python in productions or integrations?

The production configuration user interface is low-code, but in many projects, you may reach a point where you need to write some code. As discussed in the Integration Architecture course, business processes are full of places for inserting code, specifically the BPL editor (for BPL business processes) and the DTL editor (for data transformations).