CONNECT 4.0 offers new functions
Version 4.0 of CONNECT, the community-driven software platform for enabling secure health information exchange (HIE), offers several new functions, according to a webinar presented Feb. 22 by the National eHealth Collaborative.
CONNECT can help set up an exchange or a Direct HISP, tie an HIE into other HIEs, support patients with technology to electronically carry their health record as they traverse the healthcare system, said Greg Turner, CONNECT product manager. “CONNECT supports providers by enabling a more complete medical picture of a patient and provides a method to meet certain mandated interoperability requirements.”
The new iteration offers request justification, registry services and patient preferences regarding the sharing of health information, Turner said.
There was a “big agenda” for the new version, said Leslie Power, CONNECT development manager, but the goals were accomplished and in open source. “It’s one thing for the government to encourage the use of EHRs and information sharing, but it’s not right to leave implementation entirely in the hands of the private sector.” The government and the private needed the same functions, she said, and the new version is available for download and modification for use by anyone for any need. “People are welcome to repurpose it for their needs.”
In addition to being released as an open source product, CONNECT also was developed as an open source product, Power said. “CONNECT was released as open source code to keep costs low and to promote the widespread adoption to encourage HIE.”
CONNECT serves as the plumbing for HIE, Power said. “CONNECT sits between the HIE implementation system, or EHR, and exchange partners.
The presenters offered the following overview of CONNECT 4.0’s offerings:
- Increased throughput targeting increased numbers of patient data, quality data, research data and decision support transactions. “This is a significant step forward for the product,” said Turner. “What we set out to do has migrated from a reference implementation through to a production system. With this release, we wanted to offer an enterprise grade system that’s going to support national rollout plans.”
- Exchange and process large payload sizes of up to 1GB, which “significantly increases performance capabilities.”
- Users can run CONNECT on additional application servers such as IBM WebSphere and Oracle WebLogic to meet their environment needs.
- More comprehensive event logging and metric data.
- Ability to determine the state of a transaction across messages in order to better review and analyze the operations of CONNECT and adopters’ trading partners.
- Minimum deployment load by supporting a lightweight gateway which allows smaller server footprint and use of system resources.
- Support Direct messages to allow for greater adoption and exchange. That allows the platform to support two types of protocols through one implementation, said Turner, and “provides flexibility. We think it’s wonderful for the community that we’ve been able to meet a lot of needs requested for some time.”
Go to www.connectopensource.org for more information.
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.