05/23/2006

InterSystems Corporation today launched Ensemble HIE (health information exchange), a new software product that enables fast, cost-effective, and secure clinical data exchange for the rapidly expanding Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) and other HIE networks now being designed and developed around the world.

ebizQ was provided with the following details:

The leading database provider in healthcare, InterSystems develops and markets the CACHÉ post-relational database and Ensemble universal integration platform.

“Ensemble HIE is a new edition of our Ensemble universal integration platform that combines advanced development and integration features with standards-based, healthcare-exchange-specific functionality,” said Paul Grabscheid, InterSystems Vice President of Strategic Planning.

Pre-built for Fast Development, Deployment

This new product extends Ensemble with six advanced software services:

• Clinical Data Exchange Services, with support for emerging standards such as the recently announced Connecting for Health Common Framework;



• Patient Identification Services, which provide high fidelity, high performance patient search and record location and support industry leading patient match engines;



• Consent Management Services, for recording and enforcing patient opt in or opt out declarations;



• Terminology Services, with support for a wide variety of standard terminology sets including SNOMED, ICD 9/10, CPT and LOINC;



• Security Services, including strong encryption, authentication and authorization technologies; and



• Access Services, including direct integration points to enable existing applications to access remote demographic and clinical data as well as a powerful clinical viewer that provides intuitive access to virtually any clinical data through an easy-to-deploy pure browser interface.

With this broad range of services, Ensemble HIE offers a different approach to building HIE systems. Because of the diversity of approaches being tried with HIE, as well as the rapid evolution of technical standards, packaged application solutions lack the flexibility to meet the unique requirements of each RHIO. As a result, most HIE systems are built as “one of a kind” development projects that combine general-purpose technologies – integration engines, databases, portals, and so on – with substantial custom application development.

By combining a set of comprehensive health exchange services with rapid development tools for efficiently closing the gap between those services and the unique approach and requirements of each RHIO, Ensemble HIE is designed to dramatically speed the development and deployment of HIE solutions.

“The result is a healthcare development and integration framework that can cut the time required to build networks for clinical information exchange by as much as 90%,” according to Grabscheid.

Meeting the HIE Data Exchange Challenge

“The call to create facilitators of clinical data exchange in support of a National Health Information Network (NHIN) is driving the creation of RHIOs at an incredibly rapid pace,” said Trevor Matz, InterSystems Managing Director, Application Integration. “These HIE groups are actually networks of networks that include dozens or even hundreds of hospitals, physician practice groups, clinics and payers. Given the inevitable variety of data repositories, systems, protocols and standards found in every RHIO and HIE organization, and the fact that they are all experimenting with multiple models for secure clinical data exchange, this represents a huge challenge.”

Ensemble HIE addresses this challenge by providing a flexible healthcare integration framework that kick starts data exchange. “It offers a standards-based, easy-to-use starting point for varying exchange styles, from virtual electronic health records (EHRs) to centralized repository architectures,” Matz explained.

High Performance, Massive Scalability, Easy Management

Building on more than two decades of delivering software that supports literally tens of thousands of healthcare systems worldwide, InterSystems’ track record for providing high performance, extremely scalable software is recognized throughout the healthcare sector. HIE physicians will be depending on fast information delivery in what can be life-or-death situations. And, while the pilot for a RHIO information exchange may only include a limited number of patients, the ability to scale up to support millions of patients and many thousands of users is an absolute requirement for full-scale deployment.

Enterprise-scale healthcare integration projects built on Ensemble have been developed and deployed worldwide since the product was initially launched in 2003. The choice of Ensemble as the underlying integration platform for a countrywide EHR rollout throughout the Netherlands is just the most recent example of the power, speed and scalability offered by Ensemble.

Ensemble HIE also provides the customizable, extensible end-to-end management and monitoring facilities that are key to successfully managing large, complex RHIO networks, including:

• Graphical Visual Trace to rapidly diagnose and debug system problems; *Web-based interface to enable local or remote management; *Persistent Object Engine that enables real-time access to messages for business activity monitoring, auditing, reporting and management.