Paolo Salvatori wrote a great article on streaming and buffering messages within BizTalk. He also provides a demo to give some statistics on the performance. A long article, but a must read.
Monthly Archives: May 2010
BizTalk Server ESB Toolkit and HL7 Accelerator
Last year (September-October 2010) I blogged a lot about the ESB Toolkit in conjunction with the HL7 Accelerator. I also asked myself the question: Can the Healthcare take benefits of an ESB?. I then gave the answer: “yes it can”. And I’m still supporting this, but not in conjunction with the ESB Toolkit. I have several reasons for this:
- The MLLP adapter (part of the HL7 Accelerator) is a static adapter. You can use it in combination with the ESB Toolkit, but then you still have to define all physical ports. See an earlier blog from me how to solve this.
- All (I think) hospital systems are working with ACK’s and NACK’s (some institutions ignore these). There are institutions who wants the ACK (or NACK) send be back by the receiving system to the sending system. The HL7 Accelerator (and thus BizTalk) is taking over this responsibility and sends the ACK to the sending system, before the receiving system receives its message (in my opinion: that is why you use a middleware product like BizTalk). In conjunction with the ESB Toolkit this is hard to implement, because the HL7 Accelerator components (Pipeline) are “living their own life” (you have some control, but not to use with the ESB Toolkit. See also some earlier posts of me).
- I think the most important reason not to use the ESB Toolkit, is that the most systems used in an hospital are not service oriented aware. These systems are specific to a therapy or division, and holds most of the time all information in their storage, and only share information via HL7 because of the patient information or orders/invoices. This sounds like a “no” on my own question and a Hub and Spoke makes then more sense, but it is still possible to point to some services, like the patient administration (new patient, or updated information) or give an order to multiple systems, etc. So you probably have a combination of those two. Does that matter? I don’t think so, because you still have BizTalk Server as your integration tool and the HL7 Accelerator for connecting all systems.
- Note: I’m still fan of using a canonical data model within BizTalk Server, also within the Healthcare. All systems will map to and from this data model. It will cost you some extra mappings and a small performance penalty, but at the end you can loosely couple all systems.
Please let me know what your experiences are with the ESB Toolkit in conjunction with the HL7 Accelerator.
Why using BizTalk Server in the Healthcare?
I’m not going to give you the standard reasons why you should use BizTalk Server, but I will point to the reasons from the clients I worked with. I put the list in order, from which I think is the most important reason till the least important reason. Note: because Cloverleaf is one of the widest spread integration products in the Healthcare, I can’t neglect to compare with this product.
- In comparison to other products, Microsoft BizTalk Server has a positive Return Of Investment and one of the lowest (if not the lowest) Total Cost of Ownership (wow, that sounds like sales, but it is true
) - With BizTalk Server you don’t have to deal with Vendor lock-in. BizTalk Server is not open source, but there is a large community and a lot of vendors who can deliver BizTalk Server expertise. (HL7 knowledge can still be a problem)
- BizTalk Server is not a black-box. Because of the documentation from Microsoft, bloggers, and other communities; BizTalk Server is very open.
- Keep old systems up and running. BizTalk Server is very flexible. BizTalk Server 2009 and BizTalk Server 2010 (and older versions) are delivered with the HL7 Accelerator. See my presentation or article (Dutch) for the benefits.
- One disadvantage: HL7 v2.6 and v3.0 are not supported (yet), but
- 2.5 is at the moment the de facto standard, so that shouldn’t be a problem and
- HL7 v3.0 is XML based and BizTalk Server is all about XML, so that also shouldn’t be a problem (just download the schemas from the HL7 organization site)
- One disadvantage: HL7 v2.6 and v3.0 are not supported (yet), but
- BizTalk Server has more possibilities to work with the messages in a flexible way (like translation, use custom code, enrich data via databases).
- BizTalk Server also support other transports then only MLLP.
- When you want to connect to a governance site which support SOAP, then with BizTalk Server a connection is easily established (eg. in the Netherlands: SBV-Z, Nictiz, etc).
- “Use Microsoft products, unless …” (heard twice, so there must be a truth in there
) There are healthcare institutions who shift up to Microsoft platform and therefore wants to use BizTalk Server (note: this is also the case for other platforms like SAP or Oracle).
This is the list I’m aware of (in respect to the Healthcare). Do you think I’m missing something? Or do you have another opinion? Please let me know.
