the stuff that moves patient data around
Healthcare integration
Moving clinical data between systems that were never meant to talk: HL7v2, FHIR, Mirth Connect, message queues, and consent. I've built this kind of plumbing at Bridge Connector, 1Putt Health, and MedHook. These are the articles I wish someone had handed me on day one.
start here: 3-part series
HL7 & Mirth from zero
All 10 articles
- 8 min readMirth Connect, what happened? Here's What Comes Next.Mirth democratized healthcare integration. Then NextGen acquired it, and the world moved on. What the next generation of integration tooling looks like, and why the transition was inevitable.
- 12 min readFHIR Meets Graph Databases: Exploring Healthcare's Natural Network StructureFHIR data is a graph. Treating it as flat tables is why most healthcare AI struggles with relationships between patients, providers, and encounters. What happens when you model it the way it actually is.
- 6 min read5 Reasons to Solve for Adoption Before Building Your Digital Health ToolClinicians love the idea but no one's buying. That gap is a pattern, and it almost never comes down to the technology. Five adoption problems to solve before you build the product.
- 4 min readCDS Hooks: What Nobody Tells You Before You BuildCDS Hooks look straightforward until you try to get them working in Epic. Six months of integration reality the documentation glosses over.
- 10 min readHIPAA Consent: What Engineers Actually Need to KnowHIPAA documentation runs to thousands of pages. What engineers building healthcare apps need to know, and what's compliance theater.
- 8 min readIngesting HL7v2 with ❄️ Snowflake Part 1Snowflake's flexible compute model makes it interesting for healthcare data warehousing. A walkthrough for ingesting HL7v2 messages into Snowflake: schemas, parsing, and getting clinical data into a structure you can query.
- 7 min readHL7v2 Healthcare Integrations with 🫏 MulesoftThe MuleSoft Accelerator promises a unified patient view across EHRs using FHIR and HL7v2 integrations. What that looks like in practice, where it delivers, and where you'll spend your consulting budget.
- 11 min readHow to ingest HL7v2 Messages into Google CloudHL7v2 arrives over MLLP. Google Cloud Healthcare API converts it to FHIR. A complete walkthrough for capturing healthcare messages in Google Cloud, from DICOM stores to Pub/Sub triggers.
- 5 min readMirth Connect: Part 2 - Adding 🐰RabbitMQMirth Connect handles the transform. RabbitMQ handles the delivery. Together they make healthcare integrations durable and survivable when downstream systems go down. How to wire them up.
- 6 min readMirth Connect: Part 1 - Getting Started with 🐳 DockerMirth Connect is how most healthcare orgs still move HL7v2 messages. Setup from scratch: configuring channels, parsing message types, sending and receiving messages without losing your mind.
Common questions
Is Mirth Connect still being maintained?
Yes. Version 4.5.2 shipped in September 2024 with security improvements, bug fixes, and an MFA library update. New features have moved to the commercial tier, and the GitHub repo has 400 open issues.
Who owns Mirth Connect now?
NextGen Healthcare acquired Mirth Corp in 2015. NextGen added commercial extensions on top of the open source core, and over time the pace of open source releases slowed.
Does Mirth Connect support FHIR?
Mirth has FHIR R4 support, but it sits on an architecture designed around HL7v2 message flow. Teams building FHIR-first products hit that mismatch constantly, so new FHIR work is better served by purpose-built tooling.
What is a modern alternative to Mirth Connect?
MedHook is a self-hosted integration platform built on visual DAG workflows, TypeScript, and AI-powered field mapping. It handles HL7v2, FHIR R4, and X12 EDI, ships with adapters for Epic, Athena, and Oracle Health, and runs as an 8-service Docker stack in your own infrastructure.