As enterprise innovation within a healthcare enterprise is driven by digital health adoption, data sharing and accessibility of data is one of the key focus towards a connected health ecosystem. The Mirth Connect interface engine has gained fast adoption and recognition, turning into the most frequently downloaded open-source solution for medical services integration.

This adaptable and scalable integration solution has been designed for a wide number of platforms such as Windows, Mac, Linux, and VMS. Mirth Connect isn't only easy to use with its simple GUI but also supports multiple connection types that give solid interoperability. Supported connection types include HL7, FTP/SFTP, DICOM, ANSI X12, HTTP, XML, JMS, LLP/MLLP, and PDF/RTF.

In this blog post, we discuss the key factors that make Mirth Connect a go-to for healthcare interface engines even today. 

1: Interoperability

Healthcare organizations use various health information systems and frameworks like EHRs, lab systems, pharmacy systems, radiology systems, etc. Since there are different types of branches and frameworks, we have various conventions for different tasks, inconsistent data coming from multiple different sources, and mismatched data types. While a few systems use HL7, X12, NCPDP and DICOM, the others use XML or any other method. This causes issues among the system of departments. 



Mirth Connect is to give an effective solution to address these issues. Also, Mirth provides an administrative feature to create roles and tasks for different clients or managers. You can assume Mirth as a door between labs or centers inside your healthcare framework that deals with multiple data and connection types.

2: Scalability 

Mirth Connect is fit for processing a large number of messages each day. No matter what size your organization is, Mirth Connect can easily scale up to address your healthcare requirements of any size. Regardless of whether you're dealing with a couple of interfaces or two or three thousand interfaces, Mirth Connect has the speed and scalability needed for your business, regardless of the size. A wide range of instances offered by Mirth provides an edge to carry out process development in your organization as your need to expand. 

3: Successful Maintenance

For reliable maintenance and support, Mirth Connect additionally offers interfaces for Users, Settings, Alerts, Events, and Extensions. These various interfaces assist you with setting up alarms to notify you when there is an error occurred. It also helps in installing extensions to expand the functionalities of the interface engine and set up server processes to remove junk messages from your database to free up extra storage.

4: Smooth Integration

The enterprise solutions offered by Mirth Connect have complete accessibility to carry out integrations of NextGen healthcare data frameworks, such as the NextGen EHR and practice management platforms. It also has specialty-specific healthcare record programs that offer frameworks developed for healthcare organizations and comes customized with NextGen services, strong business intelligence tools, and the managed cloud IT systems to support a seamless integration process.

5: Open Source

Mirth is open source and free to use as it is covered by Mozilla Public license and has one of the biggest community of users. Being open source one can easily develop, test, deploy and monitor their own custom interfaces. Moreover with latest support included through FHIR listeners and FHIR sender, Mirth now supports also a FHIR data type that allows channels to accept both XML and JSON without having any modification of the code to handle XML or JSON.