Rhapsody 6.6 was anchored in both the voice of the customer and the four-part strategy that helps guide our organization into the future. Those four pillars can be seen below, along with the problems that Rhapsody 6.6 solves in each area.
- Enhance cross-organizational interoperability: We’ve been hearing more—from our users and the broader market —about the most pressing integration challenges including emerging requirements for external trading partners.
Rhapsody’s approach to enabling this cross-organizational interoperability is by broadening our standards-based capabilities and optimizing communication between institutions. We believe this continued focus of healthcare data standards will ensure your organization has the tools and guidance to more easily support integration workflows outside of Rhapsody, while provide greater access to patient-centered clinical data regardless of where it resides.
The ONC and CMS patient access mandates also cast the need for standards-based approach to cross-organizational interoperability as a market mandate. To address this business and operational challenge, we’ve invested heavily in our FHIR capabilities while continuing to expand Rhapsody’s libraries, and modernized our functionality around IHE Connection participation, FHIR projects, and other standard bodies nationally and globally. As such, users can now benefit from 64-bit DICOM standard support.
- Simplify interface engine migrations, upgrades: One primary challenge our customers experience when looking to either migrate existing interfaces or actualize the value of a product upgrade is the operational and technical burden of validating an interface. In Rhapsody 6.6 we’ve made huge steps forward in easing the integration testing, historically the most manual, error-prone, and time-consuming part of the process. The end-to-end route testing feature is our solution to this problem.
The feature enables the verification of all the components a message is processed by or interacts with from the point where it enters a Rhapsody route to the point before it reaches the configured target point. This ability to provide nearly full component verification coverage to within your engine, ensures your organization and staff need to complete much less manual route testing when migrating or upgrading your engine.
- Enable the shift toward the cloud: Historically, the Health IT industry has been reticent to adopt emerging technology, such as cloud tools/deployments. However, with the ONC/CMS rules creating a federal mandate for providers, payers, and HCIT vendors to leverage FHIR API endpoints, facilitating patient access to their healthcare data, we’re confident that cloud adoption is quickly becoming a technology/deployment strategy you must plan for.
With this in mind, we’ve invested heavily in having JSON support in the mapper. This allows the Rhapsody engine to operate more as an ecosystem in which you can more natively work with REST APIs. Additionally, this JSON support in the mapper helps ensure the Rhapsody engine continues to be a market leader in FHIR support, enabling the turnkey mapping of JSON resources.
- Open for partnerships: Innovation within healthcare IT can only happen when you’re tasked with solving complex and forward-facing challenges. At Rhapsody, this work is done in the Co-Creation Lab (CCL). This group partners with customers to find solutions to interoperability challenges, with the goal of bringing novel solutions to the market.
The CCL builds products that leverage our engines as the centerpiece of a platform for solution delivery. Some of the most notable solutions the CCL has delivered throughout 6.6 are FHIR Maps and the DICOM Edge support, two projects that we expect will bring sustained value to the market.
I would like to add my appreciation to all the customers who partnered with us throughout the 6.6 release cycle, providing invaluable feedback on our product development. Ensuring that we’re co-developing with our customers is a core value at Rhapsody; it forces us to deliver the best possible problem-solution fit to our users by garnering their feedback continually throughout the development lifecycle and iterating our development based on that feedback.
The Rhapsody 6.6 release is both a milestone for our company in delivering robust, performant developer tools, while ensuring our strategic pillars and the voice of the customer anchor that development.
