Boston's CareGroup Healthcare System, an integrated delivery network (IDN) composed of four hospitals and hundreds of clinics and physicians' offices, has selected the InterSystems Ensemble rapid integration and development platform to replace its legacy eGate platform for strategic integration throughout the organization.
CareGroup's hospitals are Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and New England Baptist Hospital in Boston, Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge and Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Needham, Mass.
Steve Herzog, CareGroup's senior director of financial systems, said the decision to transition from eGate to Ensemble came after an intensive evaluation. "We developed a document outlining all of the requirements and expected deliverables from an Ensemble proof-of-concept," he said, noting that CareGroup's IT specialists designed a test environment where Ensemble was used to replicate and build the interfaces used on a production basis.
Beyond proving that Ensemble could support all current file and application interfaces, CareGroup found that configuration was fairly straightforward – an important consideration in an organization where Ensemble will eventually handle more than 200 system and information interfaces.
"Ensemble will be used to support data integration throughout the IDN," said Herzog. "Our strategy is to deploy Ensemble at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center first and then to the community hospitals that are included in the CareGroup network."
CareGroup's first major integration initiative involves integrating an SCC Soft Computer Softlab laboratory information system with the Ensemble platform. "We've developed the Ensemble interfaces, are currently in test mode, and plan to roll the application into production in October," said Herzog. "And we have some fairly standard HL7 applications that will probably be migrated to Ensemble before 3Q10."
Ensemble's support for secure HL7 connectivity to other systems in real-time mode, and the ability to rapidly develop new interfaces, are key benefits to executing CareGroup's integration strategy, said Herzog. "We see increased usage of secure protocols for transmitting across the Web among the companies that the IDN deals with."
He added that real-time access to live and previously processed messages for high reliability and recoverability of long-running business processes are another notable feature. "Messages are transient with eGate," said Herzog. "In contrast, Ensemble stores messages in an easily accessible embedded database. As a result, the process is both easier and faster when messages have to be resent."
Paul Grabscheid, vice president of strategic planning at Cambridge-based InterSystems, notes that CareGroup "is recognized worldwide for innovative use of healthcare technology and we've had the opportunity to work with them for more than a decade on projects built on InterSystems's advanced software technologies. We appreciate the opportunity to support CareGroup's transition to Ensemble as they take the next steps on the road to completely connected healthcare."
