OSS Mirth® Connect Package by Innovar Enterprise Ed. (Not NextGen)

I used Mirth Connect Health Check to ensure that our Mirth Connect is up and running and we do not have any downtime.

We have hosted Mirth Connect on a server, and to ensure Mirth is running, we set up some background services that keep checking for the service. Instead of that, we have an endpoint for this health check, and I use that endpoint by providing the IP address of the server to get the status, such as the version. I was using version 4.4.2. When I hit that endpoint, I get that version, and if I am getting that version, that means our service is up and running successfully, and I do not have to worry about Mirth being down.

It is just for monitoring and to ensure there is no downtime. Mirth Connect Health Check is deployed on a public cloud or private cloud that can be accessed only within the organization. I use Azure as our cloud provider.

It has helped me save some time, and using this, I made sure that I am very accurate about our downtime, and I do not have to rely on any third-party service or microservices to ensure that Mirth is up and running.

If I want to go manually and log into the server to check that, it takes almost 30 minutes, but with Mirth Connect Health Check, it is just one click away, and I get the response status.

Mirth Connect Health Check offers features for managing performance and checking for downtime, and I do not have to manage any credentials for this. I do not have to pass any credentials for this; it just gives me a status of Mirth Connect.

I do not have to hardcode any administrator password for that engine, which keeps a security perspective very good because I am not storing any username and password.

Feature-wise, using this provides downtime prevention, and I can also use it after updating Mirth Connect to validate that the update went through successfully on the new version. I believe this is the main thing.

There are some things I have to look for, basically just having the ability to check if Mirth is up and running. I cannot check the data inside Mirth Connect, such as the channels, or whether they have any errors or anything. It is limited to the status of Mirth Connect, so I feel I need to start adding the channel information and the channel statuses also.

If a database crashes but Mirth web service is still running and working, I will get a 200 response or the version. That means our database is not working, but Mirth Connect is up. So that is incorrect information. I do not face this issue too frequently, but still, it should be improved.

I have been using Mirth Connect Health Check for the past four years, and I have been using the health check for almost two years.

It is perfectly stable; it is 100% stable right now. It is not complicated—just hit an endpoint and I get the response.

I believe it can scale and improve many things. It is just one endpoint for Mirth Connect Health Check, and I do not have to keep track or have problems handling another endpoint. It is pretty good; I have not faced any issues, and I believe it can scale very much.

I previously used some microservices that required me to manage that service, consuming extra memory and causing issues, and I had to maintain that service again. With Mirth Connect Health Check, I do not have to maintain anything; it is just an endpoint, and I hit it to get the response based on which I do checks.

Definitely, if I am spending 30 minutes checking Mirth Connect health status, I am saving 30 minutes for a server.

I am not sure about pricing and setup cost because that is managed by the management, who decide and give me access.

I evaluated the microservices, which was an in-house tool I developed to check Mirth health continuously.

I give Mirth Connect Health Check an 8 out of 10 because it is a must-needed tool that decreased some time monitoring Mirth Connect services.

I chose 8 out of 10 because it is just checking Mirth status and Mirth Connect health; that is it. Nothing else, such as no channel checks or error checks or database connection checks. I believe if those are included, it will definitely be a 10 out of 10.

I feel Mirth Connect Health Check is getting HIPAA compliant, which follows regulation in the US, so I believe it is secure to use, speeding up tasks and ensuring I am compliant.

The output is 100% accurate, and I do not think there is any accuracy problem. But as I said, if the channel is not working or the database connection is not working, I still get the response saying 200, which means the server is fine, and Mirth is working fine.

I would say Mirth Connect Health Check is a perfect tool or service to check on Mirth if I have 100 clients and servers running 100 Mirth Connect instances. Instead of checking manually, it saves a lot of time and is pretty quick.

My main use case for Mirth Connect Health Check is for healthcare integrations, particularly the HL7 FHIR interface.

A specific example of how I use Mirth Connect Health Check for those integrations involves CCDA to FHIR conversion. I receive CCDA files from the source, read the XML CCDAs, and transform that data as a FHIR bundle. Based on the mapping standards, I map all CCDA fields to FHIR properties according to the resource. Once the parsing is completed, I generate the FHIR bundle for each CCDA.

When mapping those sensitive fields to FHIR properties, I encounter challenges, particularly for a couple of properties that are sometimes optional. These properties will be present on CCDA, but sometimes they won't be. I need to handle this based on conditions, such as whether the value is present or not. If I do not add that condition, it will not tightly populate the data, leading to an error on the FHIR store. I must ensure the value is present in the input, and if it is present, then I need to populate it; otherwise, I should not populate any empty data.

Apart from my main use case, I have used Mirth Connect Health Check in a different situation where I need to sync the source system's data to the destination system. In the source system, there is a dental PM system where the daily appointments are stored in their database. I need to read that, and the appointment data needs to be updated in another system's database. For this particular use case, I used Mirth Connect Health Check to implement.

Mirth Connect Health Check has positively impacted my organization by making integration seamless and being developer-friendly. I have made successful integrations for various clients and sources, which has led to appreciation and allowed me to complete the work as per my commitments.

Regarding the positive outcomes from using Mirth Connect Health Check, I can point to improvements in project delivery time and reusability. For example, if I build an HL7 ADT interface for one client, I can reuse the same interface for another client by slightly updating some required fields based on their specifications. Reusability helps me onboard the source easily, which is one of the positive sides.

The best features Mirth Connect Health Check offers are all the required features for making integration seamless. It supports all types of various connectors to connect between the source and destination systems. It also makes the transformation of one particular message type to another easy using JavaScript and inbuilt connectors, which I find to be useful features.

In my day-to-day use cases, I usually use the TCP/IP file reader as a connector because the files are received through a secured network, making TCP/IP a useful source.

Regarding the features of Mirth Connect Health Check, the performance is a major advantage, especially when ingesting a huge amount of data. The interface engine's performance is crucial, and Mirth Connect Health Check handles it well beyond the limit. That is one of the best advantages of having it.

Regarding Mirth Connect Health Check's capabilities, governance and security are key features that need to be in healthcare integrations. Most importantly, the application needs to be secured and should not be accessed by third parties. Mirth Connect Health Check handles the security-related areas in a proper manner, and I would say it is in a good place.

I believe Mirth Connect Health Check could be improved as the interface should be slightly better. Currently, I would say it is developer-friendly, but some improvements would be beneficial. However, functionality-wise, it delivers what it needs to.

Regarding Mirth Connect Health Check's capabilities, I think it needs some improvements on the transformers for accuracy and reliability of output.

I have been using Mirth Connect Health Check for four or more years.

Mirth Connect Health Check's scalability is good.

The customer support for Mirth Connect Health Check is good.

My main use case for Mirth Connect Health Check is primarily for data transmission from a different source to a different destination. As a source application, if I am using HL7 or XML or JSON, the outbound requires a different data format such as a FHIR resource.

A quick specific example of how I use Mirth Connect Health Check for data transmission is that it is mostly used in our organization for different health clinical applications. Those clinical scenarios are pushed into the respective repository system or clinical devices.

I mainly use Mirth Connect Health Check as an interface engine. In my case, I am transforming those HL7 formats.

The best features Mirth Connect Health Check offers are that it provides a graphical way to create channels, source connectors, destination connectors, filters, and transformers without the need for extensive coding. The dashboard messages browser allows me to track message status, receiving, send, error, and troubleshooting issues quickly. It supports HL7, XML, JSON, and TCP/IP and HTTPS, RESTful APIs, and databases.

Out of all those features, I find myself appreciating the troubleshooting issues, error identification, the API, and multiple protocols the most.

The message browser logs, test messages, and connection testing make troubleshooting easier than many custom integration solutions. It also provides JavaScript and custom libraries that can be integrated for advanced use cases.

In our organization, we are mostly using patient care devices, services, and order APIs. So mostly, EMR data, we are integrating with Mirth Connect Health Check as an HL7 integration. For the outbound, we are sending using RabbitMQ to device applications.

Since using Mirth Connect Health Check, I have noticed that it has definitely reduced a lot of time as an HL7 or healthcare data integration. Different data formats require compliance and other aspects, but if I go with some other native language, it takes more time to build an application. Mirth Connect Health Check is very easy to use.

I think Mirth Connect Health Check can be improved by adding more features, such as a security part and some other plugins, such as a spec check or the setting check, and other things can be improved.

Regarding needed improvements, I feel that compared to the modern web-based integration platform, administrator interfaces look dated and less intuitive for the new user. High-volume interfaces may require carefully threading or database or JVM tuning for optimal performance. Additionally, the licensing changes have reduced the traditional open-source flexibility for newer versions.

I have been using Mirth Connect Health Check for around eight years.

Regarding Mirth Connect Health Check's AI capabilities, I think its governance and security are positive since they are using ChatGPT as a plugin, which is good to see.

Concerning Mirth Connect Health Check's AI capabilities, for accuracy, I sometimes get a good response, but sometimes I need to analyze those responses, and based on that, I can utilize those replies.

Mirth Connect Health Check is deployed in my organization on a private cloud. The private cloud deployment is on-premises because I do not trust a cloud for health data, so I am using our on-premises setup.

For others looking into using Mirth Connect Health Check, I advise checking the UI for the application's utilization, receiving messages, and error-out messages.

I would like to mention some strengths about Mirth Connect Health Check, including its easy channel creation and monitoring, excellent HL7 and FHIR interoperability support, powerful transformation capabilities, and its support for many protocols and integration patterns. The weakness part is that the UI is somewhat outdated, making it difficult to manage with large environments, and it requires JavaScript knowledge for advanced development. Performance tuning and governance are needed to support enterprise-scale development. I would rate Mirth Connect Health Check an eight out of ten.

My main use case for Mirth Connect Health Check is to use this as a router to get HL7 messages, HL7 V2 messages and route them to a transformation service, getting information later for HL7 to fire for HL7 V2 messages from medical devices. Currently, at my company, we are not using Mirth Connect Health Check; we're using an in-house product.

Mirth Connect Health Check has positively impacted my organization by speeding up deployment time in my previous jobs. When I mention deployment time, I mean it helped reduce the time needed for deployments; instead of having to build our own HL7 V2 gateway and our own transformation services, we were able to have the demo running in two days, and we were able to have a full pipeline running within a couple of weeks.

The best features that Mirth Connect Health Check offers in my experience are stability, API, and the ability to extend via Java.

The API of Mirth Connect Health Check helps me with remote management of Mirth Connect Health Check; I was able to use simple scripts to manage it, so I could deploy, create channels, and deploy transformation rules via the API without having to rely on the user interface, and Java helped me in one case to use the IBM HL7 V2 libraries and another use case was to integrate it with a message broker.

Mirth Connect Health Check helps me manage or monitor those transformations by solving a couple of challenges; the first one is that Mirth Connect Health Check is pretty mature, and the concept of channels makes a lot of sense, as Java is something I used a lot and I valued greatly.

In my opinion, Mirth Connect Health Check can be improved in a couple of ways; the first thing is that since we used to have in the previous company multiple Mirth Connect Health Check installations, it would be very useful if there was a unified interface to manage all those installations from one interface, and second, a simplified UI as the current UI probably needs an interface instead of JavaScript.

I have been using Mirth Connect Health Check on and off in various projects for at least six years.

In my experience, Mirth Connect Health Check is very stable; it's a very stable solution.

Mirth Connect Health Check's scalability is pretty good for small to medium hospitals, but for bigger installations, we had issues talking about millions of messages per day, and that's why we ended up coding our own solution.

The customer support for Mirth Connect Health Check was pretty good as we did not use the paid version but used the open-source version.

Before Mirth Connect Health Check, we needed a different solution because we needed much more control over the incoming messages and custom code; that's why we coded our own custom solution.

I have seen a return on investment with Mirth Connect Health Check; the time saved, as I mentioned before, was significant as the time to the demo and time to have it working was very fast, and it saved us a lot of time building our own HL7 gateway, but then we changed to building for customers because it made more sense for us.

Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Mirth Connect Health Check, I used the open-source version, so the license was open, which for us was perfect, and the pricing was basically zero while the setup is good.

Before choosing Mirth Connect Health Check, we evaluated other options between Mirth Connect Health Check versus in-house code, and we decided for Mirth Connect Health Check since it was just easier to have it starting and to have it going at the beginning.

The advice I would give to others looking into using Mirth Connect Health Check is that the learning curve is steep and you will need time to understand the internals, how it works, but once you have it, it becomes fire and forget, so you configure it once and that's it; it's a very good tool.

I rate Mirth Connect Health Check overall as a ten out of ten.

If I had to pick a number from one to ten, I would give Mirth Connect Health Check overall a solid eight; once you know the tool, it just goes. I choose eight out of ten because of the learning curve; if the UI was simpler, onboarding for new developers would be faster.

Regarding Mirth Connect Health Check's AI capabilities, I think its governance and security are lacking since I used the open-source version, and I think it can be easier to extend the current capabilities. The accuracy and reliability of output are perfect.

My main use case for Mirth Connect Health Check is to gather data for my healthcare client. We used to gather data from the clinical instruments in Mirth Connect and then translate that data through Mirth Connect to our company application that was for QC data. Then we used to translate that data in the reporting format for our healthcare client.

A quick specific example of how I used Mirth Connect Health Check in that process is by handling diagnostic data. The type of diagnostic data I collected includes all the blood reporting data for lab results. We used to get the data in our Mirth Connect application through something called grabber in our application. Grabber was a programming language that used to connect to the instrument using Mirth Connect. There used to be a configuration in Mirth Connect with a server ID, server IP address, and port number. That configuration used to communicate with the application, and then we used to capture the data from the instrument using Mirth Connect Health Check. Mirth Connect Health Check was a receiver. From there we used to collect data in our application using that terminal server that was a physical device with its own IP address and port number.

One main challenge I faced was because I was using a 32-bit application, and the amount of data that we were collecting was significant since it was our country's biggest laboratory, processing thousands of samples every day. The limitation of Mirth Connect Health Check was handling a huge amount of data, and since the application memory was very low, it sometimes hung. However, we used to process data part by part. There was also a higher memory version of Mirth Connect Health Check available. When we migrated to that version, our experience became much easier. Mirth Connect Health Check is a very useful tool to use.

The best features Mirth Connect Health Check offers include easy connectivity to protocols, and through those channels, I can always grab the data.

Protocol admin feature helps in my daily work by providing one-to-one channel communication with the instrument because I used to connect hundreds of clinical instruments with Mirth Connect Health Check, each having their own IP address. There is never a data collision, and that is one of the cool features we had, allowing for one-on-one communication. That was the biggest feature.

Mirth Connect Health Check has positively impacted my organization because all the data comes into a single application, and we do not need separate applications to grab the data.

Having all the data in a single application helped my team by saving time and improving accuracy. We did not have to browse through different applications or pay vendors for their applications, making it a go-to tool for all the data with a very user-friendly UI. Everything worked perfectly, saved our time, and the data improved and became more accurate without collision.

An improvement point I see for Mirth Connect Health Check is a heavier version in terms of memory.

I chose eight out of ten because it is not a web application.

I have used Mirth Connect Health Check for around three years or three and a half years.

Mirth Connect Health Check is 100% stable.

Mirth Connect Health Check's scalability is there because it can expand and be installed on different servers as well, making it more scalable.

Customer support was not that great at that time, but I would say it was not too bad either.

Before Mirth Connect Health Check, I used to collect data in our network in a folder. When I heard about Mirth Connect Health Check, it was an application with more cool features because I could create all the instruments in one single stop without having to use different folders.

In terms of money, I estimate my organization saves probably around $10,000 Canadian annually.

I did not evaluate other options because Mirth Connect Health Check was a one-stop shop for us.

I would advise others looking into using Mirth Connect Health Check to look for its capability in handling data. If that suffices your requirements, definitely go ahead, and also check for a web-based version if available.

Regarding Mirth Connect Health Check's AI capabilities, it provides the fundamental features that you would expect, such as user roles, permissions, and admin controls. These controls should be tied to least privilege or probably named accounts. For security purposes, deployment should be secure, with regular patching and database security.

I have not used Mirth Connect Health Check with AI, so I would not be in a perfect situation to answer that about its accuracy and reliability of output.

I believe I have covered the main points. I gave this product a rating of eight out of ten.