Mid-Essex integrates systems in just 4 weeks

Tags: HL7 Pathology

07 Aug 2007

Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust has successfully installed an enterprise integration engine able to support interfaces in multiple medical terminologies.

While integration engines can typically take three months to implement the trust was able to complete its installation of Ensemble in just four weeks.

The InterSystems Ensemble interface engine will provide trust-level integration for its 15 existing legacy systems. It also provides the foundations to ensure integration and interoperability of new systems planned by the trust.

Ensemble translates HL7 messages between the old Clinicom patient administration system (PAS) and 15 different medical systems, including Radiology, Laboratory, Theatres, A&E and Pharmacy. All of the 15 interfaces required

As part of the deployment InterSystems developed, tested, and deployed 15 interfaces in four weeks enabling messages to be translated and communicated between different systems.

Mike Casey, IT director at Mid-Essex, told E-Health Insider. “The requirement was to put in place a trust-wide integration engine that will connect our existing systems and the multiple medical systems we will be introducing over the next six months, including pathology.”

Casey explained that a key requirement of the integration engine was to enable different medical languages to communicate including HL7.

The links such as that to A&E are based on sophisticated bi-directional links, interrogating and interpreting messages as they enter and leave the system, enabling free flow of messages between systems.

Casey described the trust–level integration as “the pre-cursor to a lot of other implementations planned by the trust”, including picture archiving and communications (PACS), pathology and order communications.

Link

InterSystems Ensemble

Readers Comments

Record breaking Integration in 4-Weeks

10 Aug 07 09:38

Is this possible? Integration with full Order Comms to Radiology, Pathology with a significant amount of work required to Pharmacy, A&E and Theatres. This is some achievement, one assumes that the new integration engine is doing very much what the previous offering provided but with the capability of migrating to HL7. Surely a Integration Project Lifecycle documentation alone would stretch into this period.

Nevertheless an achievement in its own right if this is the case.

Amazed!

10 Aug 07 11:07

I actually work on intergration engines, and I really find it hard to believe thye managed to get 15 interfaces all configured,built and tested in 4 weeks.

Unless there is actually only 1 or 2 feeds inbound and the rest is the same message sent out to different clinical system. I.E. the patients demographics.

My experience shows that most suppliers who support HL7 do not conform to even the basic parsing rules, such as escaping characters.

I would also be interested to know how much throughput of messages occur per day but, as it currently stands, there is no case study on the Intersystems website, which I would be interested in reading.