We suggested using solution based on Mirth Connect, an open source healthcare integration engine.
The first project tasks involved installing the development, training, qualification and production environments using Mirth Appliance. Mirth Appliance proposes an out of the box high availability architecture while simultaneously simplifying administration to a great extent. This is done through features such as automatic update and direct link to product support.
Team training came next, carried out by experienced and certified consultants. This gave the HUG a quick start on integrating. To date, the hospital has more than 20 people who can develop integration channels, which shows how easy it is to work with Mirth Connect.
The next deliverables were two reference channels: a generic file transfer channel and an embryo of patient administration channel (HL7 ADT). Both were developed and completed by development guidelines explaining best practices, naming conventions, code documentation, channel design, etc.
We then developed a solution to manage the development process. This was done reusing the available Java tooling: SVN as source code repository; Maven as the build and packaging tool; and XL Deploy for application deployment.
We finalised the project by setting up a unit testing framework based on JUnit.

Now able to operate on its own, the HUG continues to work on fine-tuning the solution to meet its evolving needs with, for example, channel cartography, monitoring dashboards and advanced alerting.