Hospitals are increasingly looking for flexibility as they expand their interoperability capabilities and activities. As with many attributes, individuals have different meanings for the term “flexible.” Position and job responsibilities will inform a person’s perception of product flexibility, whether you are on the front line of interface development or if you are a director overseeing strategic planning for application integration.
Leadership teams ask if a more inclusive pool of talent can be recruited and trained to use an integration engine to build interfaces between healthcare applications. An engine developed to meet and cater to a broad base of users – from application analysts to highly experienced interface programmers – will be regarded as highly flexible. Products that can build extremely complex interfaces using the same development principles as those used for building common/simple interfaces is a key indicator of engine flexibility.
Front-line integration specialists approach this topic on a more personal level. Interface professionals have built careers working with legacy engines. They’ve developed specialty skills needed to effectively deploy their current engine, and they can leverage some of the most obscure features to build powerful message processing workflows. This person needs to know that a more modern engine will provide flexible features to help them creatively meet interface processing challenges.
For most integration specialists, flexible means the ability to respond to unusual or extraordinary processing challenges by escaping engine product design (translation tools) and writing custom programming script or code to meet the challenge. Unfortunately, this practice is so prevalent that many shops discard completely the engine translation tools and rely entirely on a coding solution for message translations and routing. Where is the flexibility in that? The interface engine, and interface development, becomes an exclusive domain for specialists.
Instead, imagine an engine that provides all of the same functionality for message translation, processing, and routing that legacy engines provide, but does so without relying on a programming language as the primary user interface. Corepoint Integration Engine develops the same processing logic programmed by users in legacy engines, but does so with a GUI point-and-click editor. So, while programming logic is necessary in defining message processing, programming languages are not!
This leads to two observations:
- All of the integration specialists’ programming skills honed in legacy engines have direct application when used to develop interface logic in Corepoint Integration Engine
- Corepoint Integration Engine is accessible to application analysts who, while not programmers per se, can now build interfaces because it is not strictly a coding environment
Even though Corepoint Integration Engine avoids programming code in interface development, interfaces still require processing logic to map, route, and filter messages. This logic, called an Action List, is built in a GUI editor using a broad set of logic and processing operations that any programmer will recognize and any analyst can learn. With over 65 procedural operators, they are too numerous to list. However, the following logic operators illustrate the deep functionality of Corepoint Action Lists:
- If/Else constructs
- DoWhile & ForEach looping
- Switch/Case
- Database operations
- Copy Field
- Copy Message
- Erase Field.
Skeptical? This is usually the initial impression of integration specialists. Skepticism is natural, but please stay open-minded and listen to a few Corepoint Health customers:
“Not having to program a lot of code is important. That’s the thing I love the most, I don’t have to write as much pure language. All the logic is held in the action list.”
“Corepoint can handle the complexity. Conversion is easy.”
“We were able to do all that we had done before.”
“Corepoint opened up whole new world of options for us. We’re currently moving from Cerner to Epic and we can’t imagine doing this on the old system.”
“Moving to Corepoint could release your talents to be able to explore newer and powerful functionality and capabilities within your organization.”
Corepoint Integration Engine – all the flexibility you need in a healthcare integration platform.
