CONNECT releases open-source HIE software

For national and local health information exchanges (HIEs) running on the CONNECT platform, there’s a new version 3.2.1. CONNECT that uses Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) standards and governance to make sure that HIEs are compatible with other exchanges being established across the country.

In a recent CONNECT blog post, members of the CONNECT team said that the newly released version is “essentially a bug release, with a more comprehensive release, CONNECT 3.3, scheduled for this winter.”

According to the CONNECT team, some of the fixes in version 3.2.1 include:

• Correlating Multiple Responses for Patient Discovery: In previous versions of CONNECT, if a patient discovery query returned multiple matches from a Master Patient Index (due to multiple assigning authority matching), the system only created a correlation for the first match returned. Now CONNECT can correlate all responses.
• Deferred Patient Discover Requests Make Policy Checks Inside the Gateway: The new version of CONNECT now makes policy checks within the gateway as well as at the adapter level.
• Refactoring of Deferred Services Implementation: The deferred services code was refactored to make the adapter layer authoritative of the deferred queue, and to make deferred implementation document query, document retrieve and orchestrations of patient discovery consistent. This change includes fixes to the deferred implementation which allows asynchronous transactions with downstream systems.

Three elements are included in the CONNECT solution:

• The Core Services Gateway provides the ability to locate patients at other organizations, request and receive documents associated with the patient, and record these transactions for subsequent auditing by patients and others.
• The Enterprise Service Components provide default implementations of many enterprise components required to support electronic health information exchange, including a Master Patient Index (MPI), XDS.b Document Registry and Repository, Authorization Policy Engine, Consumer Preferences Manager, HIPAA-compliant Audit Log and others.
• The Universal Client Framework contains applications that can be adapted to create an edge system that can be used as a reference system, and/or can be used as a test and demonstration system for the gateway solution.

CONNECT said, “By advancing the adoption of interoperable health IT and HIEs, the nation will better be able to achieve the goal of making sure all citizens have electronic health records by 2014.”