Looking for feedback from anyone using Mirth

[rts]

I am currently evaluating Interface Engines and I am familiar with several commercial products. I'm looking for feedback from people who are currently using Mirth.
Is the product installed in a production environment?
Is the product stable?
What scripting language is being used?
ODBC behavior , with SQL server, progress and others?
HL7->XML (CCR) conversion, has anyone used Mirth for this?
Web Service support -> Remote site to central interface server via Web Services

By the way this should have been posted under the General Discussion forum , sorry


Thanks

Post edited by: searay_43, at: 08/26/2008 07:57

Post edited by: searay_43, at: 08/26/2008 08:10

[jbartels]

Re:Looking for feedback from anyone using Mirth

searay_43 wrote:

I am currently evaluating Interface Engines and I am familiar with several commercial products. I'm looking for feedback from people who are currently using Mirth.
Is the product installed in a production environment?
Is the product stable?
What scripting language is being used?
ODBC behavior , with SQL server, progress and others?
HL7->XML (CCR) conversion, has anyone used Mirth for this?
Web Service support -> Remote site to central interface server via Web Services

By the way this should have been posted under the General Discussion forum , sorry

1. Yes. We use Mirth to help route messages for our hosted clients. Approximately 50000-100000 messages a day on one installation and about 20000 on another. We'll have several more coming online in the next 6 months. We also use Mirth in development as a pass through to help us gather testing data and run load tests on other systems.
2. Very. Mirth being up and alive is the last thing on our checklist since it never goes down. Because it is stable we trust Mirth to queue/store messages when other systems go down so we can send them along when those systems are back online.
3. Javascript is the main language, you do have access to Java classes as well. There is also a good point-and-click interface for simpler transformations.
4. No experience with ODBC, but our existing production installations have Mirth running on both Postgres and SQLServer as its database and running against SQLServer making queries for data to send.
5. Mirth does have some good native XML capabilites. I am also interested in HL7->CCR conversion, my team is likely to be working on that in the next few months. Please post on the Mirth forum when you start doing that work, I'd be happy to help!
6. Our development use has Mirth converting HL7 to use against web services both as XML, SOAP, and parameterized HTTP requests.

We did have to invest some time to learn Mirth, but it was less time than we would have spent rolling our own solution or learning a proprietary system and a LOT less money since the software is free.

The community is also a decent source of free support. I would suggest using the community for prototyping and early revisions and then upgrading to commercial support from WebReach. The community is good and growing every day, but a support contract will get you accurate answers much faster once you're in production and need it to work.

Have a look around the forum and maybe come lurk in IRC for a few days. There are some kinks and gotchas with Mirth as well as some limitations to the free community support, but there are also a lot of success stories and many happy users.

Post edited by: jbartels, at: 08/26/2008 10:22

[rts]

Re:Looking for feedback from anyone using Mirth

Thanks Jon, very encouraging. I have used a commercial IE to map HL7 v2.5 to CCR. The particular project I am embarking on is just that so I will keep posting as I make progress.

Again, thanks for your response.

[oscarg]

Re:Looking for feedback from anyone using Mirth

searay_43 wrote:

I am currently evaluating Interface Engines and I am familiar with several commercial products. I'm looking for feedback from people who are currently using Mirth.

Hi Searay. I come from the services side on Webreach. We provide bundled mirth solutions that come in an appliance format. We also custom engineer and deploy mirth on a regular basis to Hospitals, Labs, medical offices, etc. I deal with these products on a daily basis and we have over 200 units on the field. Many of these are in production and have been for some time.

We run the same Mirth that is available to the public on our appliances, but we add our own management system that facilitates development and deployment, along with tons of enterprise-ready features like clustering, redundant hardware, vpn, dual networking, etc etc, plus live technical support.

I think Mirth is very mature, and stable. Also, I think that if you consider the group of people that need Mirth, the statistics of the Mirth project are very impressive; over 1000 downloads/month since Nov 06, sometimes over 2000.

With a corporate sponsor like Webreach, a full development and support staff, and a growing community of users. I think you would be safe to go with Mirth for your project. Feel free to ask some more in the forum. Also let me know if you want some links that might be of interest to you.

Is the product installed in a production environment?
Is the product stable?

Yes, and yes.

By the way this should have been posted under the General Discussion forum , sorry

maybe one of the mods can move it...

[rts]

Re:Looking for feedback from anyone using Mirth

Thanks oscar. Any information would be helpful. I have a channel setup and working that is using JDBC-ODBC. I am somewhat confused regarding the SQL panel in the DB Reader setup. When I perform a dbselect in that window can the result set be processed by the transformer ? Or would I be better off performing my selects in the transformer ?

I am basically looking to do the following:

DBSELECT x,x,x,x,x from OutPut where status = 0

For each row in resulset
{
Do conditional HL7 formatting (Ie ADT, SIU etc)
UPDATE Output set status = 1
Where x = ${x}
}

[oscarg]

Re:Looking for feedback from anyone using Mirth

Thanks oscar. Any information would be helpful.

Rts, I don't think I know how to answer your technical question. Hopefully one of the Mirth guys or other regular guys here is be able to steer you in the right direction. Maybe you can even break it out into a new post since its different from your original post...

But in regards to the xtra information I can provide, I was offering to give you some more links that would give you information about leveraging Webreach's professional services with your Mirth development. see this link (

As has been mentioned before, its great to do Mirth development with the free version, but when you come to a point where your are ready to put this to production and make sure it works, Webreach can step in to provide you that level of support, if you don't have a dedicated in-house support team; or to compliment it.

There are 4 appliance models right now, roughly in this order:

V1000 - Leverages virtualization technologies to run on your existing infrastructure. (V1000)
P1000 - Smallest of the 3 hardware appliances.
M1000 - Medium size, also hardware. (rack mountable)
E1000 - Enterprise grade, rack mountable, redundant, etc.

You might find this of interest:
Mirth Healthcare Appliance specs - http://www.webreachinc.com/info/WebR...eDatasheet.pdf
Want to know if we can help you engineer your solution? Start here... inquiries - http://www.webreachinc.com/contact-us

[jbartels]

Re:Looking for feedback from anyone using Mirth

rts wrote:

Thanks oscar. Any information would be helpful. I have a channel setup and working that is using JDBC-ODBC. I am somewhat confused regarding the SQL panel in the DB Reader setup. When I perform a dbselect in that window can the result set be processed by the transformer ? Or would I be better off performing my selects in the transformer ?

I am basically looking to do the following:

DBSELECT x,x,x,x,x from OutPut where status = 0

For each row in resulset
{
Do conditional HL7 formatting (Ie ADT, SIU etc)
UPDATE Output set status = 1
Where x = ${x}
}

rts: When you do a select in the source tab for a dbreader that rowset is accessible in the transformer. Then in your destination you would want to have a dbwriter, have it use javascript instead of SQL since you need to apply some logic and do like you outlined above.