A typical healthcare organization is made of many systems providing a wide variety of services. These systems need to communicate with each other to exchange information. For example:
- A patient demographics system that updates other systems with details of currently admitted patients.
- A laboratory system that publishes results for inclusion in the patient record and decision support systems.
Many of these systems use incompatible messaging protocols, or do not possess the means to connect to all required recipients of the messages they produce. In addition to these limitations, as healthcare organizations evolve, new systems are added. Being able to manage all communications to these systems from a single place makes the management of messaging within the organization simpler.
The Rhapsody Integration Engine (Rhapsody) is designed to connect to many different systems using a wide range of protocols. The messages received by Rhapsody can be manipulated to convert them between the various messaging standards used by each connected system.
Support for a wide array of health sector communication and messaging standards is included. Rhapsody is focused on providing solutions to the many-to-many problems frequently encountered in a Healthcare IT environment. These often result from multiple vendor-specific implementations of slightly different variations of the same messaging standard.
Rhapsody provides a multi-point integration tool within a network of disparate systems. Rhapsody provides an environment which can be more readily managed than ones relying on single point-to-point solutions between pairs of systems, while also providing the ability to support enterprise solutions. This includes support for publisher-subscriber style routing of messages within the Rhapsody engine.