InterSystems Corporation has announced that Metropolitan Health Corporation (Metro Health) has selected its Ensemble universal integration platform for major integration projects.
Ensemble will replace the SeeBeyond eGate integration software previously used by Metro Health and will also be the foundation of future integration projects. The announcement came during the HIMSS 2005 conference in Dallas, Texas.
The leading application platform provider in healthcare, InterSystems develops and markets the CACH'E post-relational database and the Ensemble universal integration platform. Metro Health is an integrated delivery network that includes Metropolitan Hospital, physician organisations, outpatient centres, managed care services and serves a growing patient base in the Grand Rapids, Michigan area.
New capabilities supplant legacy infrastructure
Requirements for rapid integration, sophisticated, end-to-end management capabilities and a real-time message warehouse drove the move to Ensemble, according to Gary VanderHeiden, Manager of IT at Metropolitan Hospital.
"Our interface specialists say Ensemble enables nearly three times faster interface development than the SeeBeyond products and provides message persistence which is lacking in eGate," said VanderHeiden.
Ensemble processes messages over 200% faster while providing nearly effortless FIFO setup as compared to eGate.
The first phase of the Ensemble project, which involves integrating eight applications including the healthcare organisation`s McKesson STAR hospital information system (HIS) to enable back-end information via more than a dozen HL-7 interfaces went live in late February. Integration of a total of 25 systems with about 65 different interfaces is projected to be complete in 2Q05.
Future Ensemble projects
With the completion of the SeeBeyond replacement, Metro Health will leverage Ensemble features for other new initiatives. "We have the same overall requirements as those of the largest urban integrated healthcare network," VanderHeiden noted. Deploying a management portal to view transaction processing in real-time is next on the agenda. Using Ensemble`s Business Activity Monitoring framework, the Metro Health support specialists can identify bottlenecks and quickly eliminate them.
"Ensemble`s visual trace tools and integrated object database will make it easy to determine when and why a record from any of the integrated data sources didn`t reach its appropriate destination," VanderHeiden said. "This can be done dynamically in real-time, which is a major improvement over the logs typically provided by other integration products. Instead of a cumbersome, time-consuming manual search, problems can be identified and resolved very quickly. Ensemble`s ability to provide rapid integration was critical to our integration platform choice."
"Metro Health`s integration requirements are characteristic of what we are hearing from our other customers and prospects in the healthcare sector," said Trevor Matz, InterSystems Managing Director, Ensemble. "Healthcare organisations of all sizes are no longer willing to settle for legacy integration approaches. They are looking for the rapid development, integration and deployment that are uniquely supported by Ensemble`s design and architecture. We`re extremely pleased to be working with Metro Health to help achieve integration success across the enterprise."
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