Hayes Review: Summer 2009

Ensemble Integration Case Study: ClearPath Diagnostics

By Andy Treanor

ClearPath Diagnostics of Syracuse, NY, is a pathologist-owned and operated tissue pathology and cytology practice.  One of the organization’s objectives is to provide the best pathology report delivery service to their customers. This includes prompt and secure electronic delivery using the best technology.  They had been using a third party to handle the integration between their internal lab and external EMR systems. However, the cost and lead time required for new interface implementation prompted ClearPath to assess alternatives for their integration needs.

To begin their vendor assessment, ClearPath asked their Cerner lab system contact for a list of Cerner client organizations that were similar to ClearPath, and which integration vendors these organizations were using. A short vendor list was created and various products were researched.  Ultimately ClearPath decided on Ensemble from InterSystems.

“We wanted a system that we could control in-house and that provided the ease of use and pre-built components that would allow us to hit the ground running,” says Greg Kennedy, IT Manager at ClearPath.  “We also wanted a tool that we can grow with as our integration needs expand.”

A major factor in ClearPath’s decision to purchase Ensemble was InterSystems’ partnership with Hayes Management Consulting. Hayes offers its Ensemble clients a “Mentoring Package” in which Hayes Ensemble experts work side-by-side with a client’s technical staff to guide them through the development and implementation process.

“The combination of Ensemble and Hayes seemed like a perfect fit for our needs. We were very comfortable with our decision,” explained Kennedy.

A well-known OB/Gyn practice was selected by ClearPath as the first customer for the new Ensemble interface.  The new interface replaced an existing HL7 interface that had been developed and supported by the third party. Working with Hayes, ClearPath was able to get an Ensemble production up and running with the HL7 interface quickly.

“I was amazed at how quickly we were able to be in a position to test the new interface,” said Kennedy. “Using the Ensemble Studio, we were able to easily replicate the data transforms that existed with our third-party’s platform. This allowed us to be in a position to start testing quickly, because our customer didn’t need to make any adjustments on their end to accept the HL7 messages coming from Ensemble.”

With the first interface up and running, ClearPath continued to build new interfaces for other customers. Using the Ensemble knowledge acquired from their time working with Hayes, they have been able to create these new interfaces on their own. Despite the fact that ClearPath has no software developers on staff, they were able to accelerate the development of new interfaces due to Ensemble’s ease of use.

As the number of interfaces increases, ClearPath may look into Ensemble’s Business Activity Monitoring and Dashboard capabilities to assist in the management and reporting of their Ensemble production data.

ClearPath Diagnostics is extremely satisfied with their choice of Ensemble as their integration platform and with Hayes as their implementation partner. They have been able to bring the integration process in-house, bring up new interfaces with various requirements more quickly and improve their customer service.

Tips for Interoperability Design with Ensemble

When using Ensemble, consider the following suggestions from Hayes interoperability consultants:

1. Maintain a spreadsheet that organizes your information system, application by application. You can create the spreadsheet on paper or by using your preferred software tool.
2. Provide one business service for each application that sends HL7 messages into Ensemble. This is an application that has at least one entry in the “Sends” column of the production spreadsheet.
3. Provide one routing process for each business service.
4. Provide one business operation for each application that receives HL7 messages from Ensemble.
5. Keep your design modular. That is, develop one interface at a time and use one routing process for each interface. Each routing rule set is simpler and easier to maintain because it only covers the cases required by one interface. It is easier to share and reuse work that is self-contained and solves a simple set of problems.
6. Keep business services and business operations simple. In general, it is not necessary to write your own code for business services or business operations. Choose the built-in classes that Ensemble provides.
7. Decide on naming conventions prior to interface development for consistency over time. Interfaces tend to be developed as part of your Ensemble production incrementally. This will avoid any inconsistencies in naming conventions between developers and the interfaces they develop.
8. Keep the design simple and clear. Simplicity does not mean fewer parts, but rather that each part within the model has a clear function and is intuitively easy to find.

Vendor Spotlight: InterSystems’ Ensemble

The integration and Interoperability of healthcare applications and systems is essential for healthcare organizations. It can also be a daunting task. Therefore, selecting and implementing an industry leading integration platform that supports these initiatives in a way that makes your time most productive is essential. It is also important for healthcare organizations to limit the resources required to build and maintain integrated systems. Therefore, the technology chosen must allow for the rapid integration of disparate systems quickly and easily, while limiting the amount of time needed for system management.

Ensemble is an easy-to-use platform for rapidly developing, deploying, and monitoring enterprise integration solutions. It is an application integration platform that enables exceptionally fast application integration as well as rapid composite application development. Ensemble’s unified integration, development, and management environment provides the following features and capabilities:

• A large Adapter Library (including adapters for HL7 and X.12), plus the ability to quickly and easily build custom adapters.
• An XML-based data transformation language that facilitates “drag-and-drop” transformations between different data formats and message types.
• A high-performance messaging engine that persists every message flowing through your integrated system.
• Graphical business process modeling and automation technology based on the BPEL standard.
• Support for process customization through user-defined business rules.
• The ability to model and manage business processes that include human workflow operations.
• Dynamic server pages development technology that enables rapid development of portals and other composite applications.
• The ability to quickly and easily build “graphical executive dashboards” that display user-defined metrics in real-time and enable alerts and automated responses to set conditions.
• A graphical display that traces (historically and in real-time) every message generated by your integrated system.

Ensemble is the only integration platform to incorporate the functionality of an integration server, an application server, a high-performance object database, and a tightly-integrated development and management environment into a single, architecturally-consistent product.

Hayes and InterSystems have developed a partnership for the purpose of providing integration solutions and real-time dashboards for both company’s clients. If you would like to know more about these services, please call Hayes at 617-559-0404.

About the Author

Andy Treanor is Vice President of Technology Solutions at Hayes, which provides interoperability and programming support to Hayes clients. He also heads up Hayes’ Software Solutions division. Andy has more than 21 years in the industry and was formerly a senior leader at GE Healthcare, formerly IDX Systems.