Customer Background

The customer is an international healthcare firm comprising of approximately 30,000 medical staff and 9500 highly skilled physicians providing care and support to their patients. They operate with more than 60 hospitals and long term care facilities, which includes 175 clinics and outpatient centers. They also provide medical insurance programs such as, Health Insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid to individuals and families.

Why IIB over Cloverleaf?

They were using Cloverleaf as their integration engine to integrate into their EHR (Electronic Healthcare Record) with other vendors. This meant that their Cloverleaf based engine was supporting more than 1000+ interfaces, yet the customer lacked a centralized web services environment that provides the needed functionalities required to aid future state model for plug-and-play.

Challenges with the existing Cloverleaf engine to achieve a centralized web services environment were,

• Web Services communication points licensing was very expensive when compared to IBM Integration Bus
• Cloverleaf did not have adequate support for web services, whereas IBM provides better and efficient support

To ensure that they were ready for the digital future, the customer made the decision to migrate their Cloverleaf deployment to IBM Integration Bus.

Technology Scope

The following tools and technologies were used in the migration effort,

• IBM Integration Bus v9.0.0.6
• IBM MQ v7.5.0.6
• IBM WTX v8.4
• MS SQL Server 2012
• Healthcare Pack 3 for IIB

Business Requirement #1

The customer wanted to implement an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) using IBM Integration Bus (IIB) to provide efficient application and data integration along with a centralized web services environment. This involved the migration of their existing Cloverleaf-based HL7 interfaces over to IBM Integration Bus.

Our Solution and Support

Miracle's EAI Team partnered with the customer in successfully executing a robust and strategic migration plan from Cloverleaf to IIB v9. Some of the highlights of the migration effort were,

• Identify a design pattern which suits the client's needs and existing system
• Building reusable ESQL libraries and java classes as needed
• Define and adhere to the coding and naming standards needed
• Thorough testing of the solution with 30-day production test data and correct any bugs - ensure a bug-free deployment
• Provide a go-live plan for each interface which includes step-by-step guide to deploy the source code in staging and production environments

Business Requirement #2

The customer was in the process of upgrading on their HL7 based EHR solution which would help them in sending certified Meaningful Use 2 data to partner organizations and vendors. To achieve this the customer wanted a Canonical Data Model (HL7 v2.7) to be implemented to ease data integration and maintainability of the interfaces.

Our Solution and Support

• Our COE team was able to provide the customer with design, implementation, unit testing and technical specifications to achieve the following, Speed of integration with introduction of new application using the canonical data model
• Reduces data modeling and schema design effort when integrating any additional downstream applications in the future
• Ease of maintenance for the long-term and traceability of transactions across the enterprise

Customer Benefits

Through the engagement Miracle's teams helped to provide the customer with subject matter expertise, development support and support for additional business requirements to optimize their overall architecture.

Based on the successful implementation and migration efforts our customer has experienced the following benefits,

• The migration efforts resulted in a continuous and efficient migration of the customer's existing Cloverleaf integration interfaces to a more robust, smarted and flexible integration solution
• Ability to connect an array of heterogeneous applications without the need for complex point-to-point connectivity, resulting in easier ways to introduce new systems and replace older systems
• By building an additional set of reusable libraries and services the time consumed on future integration requirements will be significantly reduced
• Migration efforts have helped the customer in reducing the cost of integration support and maintenance significantly for the next few years