Orion Health Launches New Rhapsody Integration Engine as a Healthcare Service Bus

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Rhapsody 4's new features, particularly around web services, security, and built-in lookup tables, are important advances. We look forward to using these capabilities to help us achieve our integration goals

Auckland, New Zealand (Vocus) August 2, 2010

Orion Health today announced the general availability of Rhapsody 4, the latest version of the Rhapsody Integration Engine. This new release of the healthcare specific platform focuses on providing greater support for the latest healthcare industry trends, technologies and standards.

Paul de Bazin, Rhapsody Product Manager said the solution now provides greater support and features for organisations using service oriented architecture (SOA) to solve their integration challenges. “Healthcare institutions are recognising the value of using integration tools to provide simple, reusable components – but they also require those components to be healthcare specific. The latest version of Rhapsody builds on almost 20 years of healthcare integration, and supports the latest standards required for interoperability.”

Integration: From CSV to CCD and everything in between

Orion Health collaborated with over 100 customers, partners and vendors to conduct the company’s most comprehensive beta testing program for Rhapsody Integration Engine to date. This extended beta program enabled Rhapsody to be tested in diverse situations to ensure the product would meet the highest performance, reliability and usability standards.

Dale Wiggins, Chief Technology Officer, Patient Care and Clinical Informatics, for Philips Healthcare said, “Rhapsody 4's new features, particularly around web services, security, and built-in lookup tables, are important advances. We look forward to using these capabilities to help us achieve our integration goals”. In April this year, Orion Health signed a global partnership agreement for Philips to deploy Rhapsody Integration Engine across its portfolio of healthcare informatics solutions.

In the UK, Connecting for Health reported that the security and encryption for sending discharge summaries between Concerto Portal and Rhapsody went above what was required for their interoperability tool kit (ITK) proof of concept. Nine vendors took part in the project, using Rhapsody as a common middleware layer. Despite tight time frames, Orion Health successfully integrated and tested all vendor systems using the new ITK standards, averaging just two days of effort per system integrated.

“Whilst we were able to successfully implement the ITK standards using the previous version of Rhapsody, the new features available in the latest version will aid development, reducing the complexity and development time for new interfaces,” said Gary McCormack, Senior Programmer at Worchestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust.

In another proof of concept project Rhapsody was successfully implemented as the messaging service for a federated information exchange in Europe. Configuration of a centralised messaging service in a federated Health Information Exchange (HIE) can be performed quickly and using Rhapsody, it was proven that timely responses to queries are possible using distributed sources.

For US hospitals and laboratories, Rhapsody demonstrates how much time can be saved through automating case reporting including improving the accuracy and speed of public health reporting. “Rhapsody’s performance and flexibility have greatly improved the timeliness and completeness of our infectious disease reporting,” said Jim Files, Epidemiology Surveillance Section Chief with the Arkansas Department of Health.

New capabilities in Rhapsody include:

•     Support for the latest communication standards such as secure Web Services. These standards have been adopted by groups such as HL7 and Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE)
•     Managed look-up tables for code system translations and other conversions
•     Advanced monitoring options with a new secure monitoring API and programmatic interface
•     Simplified web-based interfaces for monitoring and archive browsing
•     A drag-and-drop user interface designed specifically for the interface analyst.

Customer demand for Rhapsody Integration Engine continues to drive Orion Health’s sales as more hospitals, laboratories, radiology centers and healthcare software vendors choose Rhapsody as their preferred tool for interoperability.

About Orion Health® Rhapsody® Integration Engine
Orion Health Rhapsody is a powerful integration engine that delivers advanced interoperability capabilities to health sector organisations of all kinds. Rhapsody is designed for rapid, effortless installation and use, and enables fast accurate and efficient exchange of electronic standards. For more information please see http://www.orionhealth.com/rhapsody.

About Orion Health® Ltd.
Orion Health’s easy-to-use solutions and applications improve patient care and clinical decision-making by providing integrated health data in a single, unified view. By enhancing existing healthcare information systems, the Orion Health Rhapsody Integration Engine, Concerto® Portal and workflow solutions, provide healthcare workers with easy access to patient data and trends, and reduce errors and omissions by streamlining information transfer.

Worldwide, Orion Health is implementing health information communities involving over 35 million patients with hundreds of thousands of active users. Orion Health’s partners include leading health system integrators and IT vendors. Orion Health has more than 1,000 clients around the world including the New Zealand Ministry of Health and Auckland District Health Board, HealthAlliance, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board, ACT Health and New South Wales Health (Australia), Health Infoway (Canada) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). More information can be found at http://www.orionhealth.com.

Orion Health, Rhapsody, Concerto, and Symphonia are registered trademarks of Orion Health Inc, its parent/or its affiliates. Other names used may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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