Business Process Integration

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:

1. 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.
2. 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).
3. 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.
4. 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.