Interface Engines in Health Integration Services

Integration of health applications requires information created and updated in one heath application to be seamlessly available in other applications. For example information created in a patient administration system to be available in the clinical information system as well as other departmental systems such as pathology, radiology and pharmacy. A common approach is to interface information from one application to many other systems using HL7.

Interface engines typically provide functionality such as:

guaranteed store and forward of messages
"out of the box" support for the HL7 standard
message translation (moving and modifying fields within the HL7 message
message routing (messages received from one application and sent to many applications)
Graphical User Interface (GUI) based configuration and management tools
Alerts and monitoring

A number of software vendors provide interface engine products including eGate Integrator Sun (formally seebeyond), Rhapsody from Orion Systems, Cloverleaf from Quovadx Systems.