Gateway

Genesis

Healthcare applications often require an integration engine to interface with healthcare environments. Often, company-owned hardware is also required, as is some type of remote access/support infrastructure. If data is piped to or from the cloud, often a VPN is required. These deployments tend to be quite complex, expensive (hardware, OS licenses, and VPNs), and present many management challenges (OS and product upgrades/patches, VPN outages, etc.). The Gateway platform was developed for a well-known healthcare organization to replace thousands of on-premise deployments with a single platform which could be hosted on customer-owned infrastructure. The Gateway platform provides a secure tunnel for communications, a lightweight but powerful integration platform, and a management application for streamlining configuration, support, upgrades, and monitoring of each remote deployment – all at a fraction of the cost of a typical integration engine.

Goals

• No Dedicated Hardware: The Remote Integrator is light-weight and runs on commodity hardware. It is typically installed on customer-owned hardware which is managed by their IT.
• No VPN: VPNs are often expensive and challenging to configure. The Remote Integrator uses industry standard encrypted protocols, and typically requires no customer network configuration.
• Remote Management: The Remote Integrator is fully remotely managed (once installed by the customer). All configuration, upgrades, and reporting is done from the Management UI. Customers typically have no interaction with the Remote Integrator.
• Data Exchange: In addition to an encrypted, bi-direction, near-realtime tunnel between the Remote Integrator and Gateway, the Remote Integrator is a full integration engine. This means it can receive data locally in various formats (MLLP, file, REST, etc.) and supply data back to the local environment in various formats (REST into a local EMR, for example).
• Lower Licensing Cost: Full-blown integration engines tend to be expensive, and it can be cost-prohibitive to include a license with each of your software deployments. The Gateway platform can be licensed for as little as $250 per site per year.
• Connexion Compatibility: The Remote Integrator uses the same devices and channels as Connexion, making it a familiar environment for Connexion users.
• Enterprise Features: The Gateway includes a number of enterprise features similar to Connexion, including high availability, alerting/eventing, user management, authorization/authentication, monitoring, auditing, change history, metrics, and more.

Key features

Performance

The Gateway platform is designed to handle large deployments – hundreds of Remote Integrators per Gateway instance, and up to a thousand Remote Integrators across a Gateway cluster. Data transfer between Gateway and Remote Integrators can reach hundreds of messages per second, per remote Integrator (but is dependent on the network bandwidth and message size), and in aggregate can easily saturate a 1Gbs connection. Remote Integrators themselves can process thousands of messages per second (dependant on host hardware and workflow complexity), and rival full-blown integration engines.