Advanced Topics on the Mirth Connect Interface Engine
- 1. Advanced Topics on the Mirth Connect Interface Engine July 6, 2016
- 2. You have been automatically muted. Please use the Q&A panel to submit questions during the presentation
- 3. PRESENTER Nate Bessa Technical Consultant • Based in Boston, MA • Specializing in custom programming projects, HIE connectivity, data migrations, and HL7 interface development • 2+ years experience with Mirth Connect • 5+ years in healthcare IT Nate.Bessa@galenhealthcare.com
- 4. POLL #1
- 5. I. Performance tweaks II. Security improvements III. Programming suggestions IV. Maintenance strategies V. Q & A TOPICS
- 7. CHANNEL METADATA PERFORMANCE TWEAKS Add clarity to your message logs and minimize data storage needs
- 8. CHANNEL METADATA PERFORMANCE TWEAKS But most of all, speed up your message searches big time.
- 9. INCREASING HEAP MEMORY PERFORMANCE TWEAKS The Heap Size is the amount of memory made available for your Mirth Connect front end application. This plays a role especially when searching for messages in channels with lots of traffic. The Server Memory setting dictates the amount of memory that Mirth Connect as an engine will be able to use in the background. This allows Mirth to process large messages and handle heavy traffic.
- 11. SECURITY IMPROVEMENTS ENCRYPT PLAIN-TEXT CONFIG PASSWORDS Add this to your mirth.properties file and restart the Mirth Connect service.
- 12. SECURITY IMPROVEMENTS ENCRYPT MESSAGE STORAGE If you choose to use this feature, add these settings to your mirth.properties file and restart the Mirth service. For added security, you can encrypt message content stored in the database.
- 13. SECURITY IMPROVEMENTS IMPORTING A SELF-SIGNED SSL CERTIFICATE 3 2 1
- 15. POLL #2
- 16. MOVE FUNCTIONS TO CODE TEMPLATES PROGRAMMING SUGGESTIONS Allows you to edit a function in one location instead of having to make changes in every channel where you are using. Also lets you keep your channels simple by moving long and complicated code out of them and into the code templates screen.
- 17. MODIFY AN HL7 MESSAGE WITH DATABASE DATA PROGRAMMING SUGGESTIONS Incoming Hl7 Message (note PID 4 is blank) Transformed Hl7 Message (PID 4 now has the PatientMrn) Source Transformer Javascript Writer The row in our table we want to query Using a code template for database connections
- 18. COMMON CHANNEL SETTINGS PROGRAMMING SUGGESTIONS
- 19. ENVIRONMENT STRATEGIES PROGRAMMING SUGGESTIONS • Programmatically dictate desired behavior based on server names rather than manually making changes to channels between development and production environments. • This eliminates potential for human error when exporting channels from development environment to production.
- 20. ROUTING A MESSAGE TO OTHER CHANNELS PROGRAMMING SUGGESTIONS
- 21. KNOW THE REASON FOR FILTERING PROGRAMMING SUGGESTIONS If you use a lot of filters, Mirth Connect currently does not tell you which filter was triggered. If that information is useful, here is a custom way of showing that.
- 22. USING A JAVASCRIPT LIBRARY TO ENCRYPT FILES PROGRAMMING SUGGESTIONS
- 24. MESSAGE STORAGE IMPACT MAINTENANCE STRATEGIES Uses the most disk space which also slows processing time. Preserves essential troubleshooting data. Pair with pruning options to keep disk usage in check. Stores just the original source message. No mapped variables. Reprocess a message when you need to troubleshoot one. Deletes everything except what you see on the channel message log. Cannot reprocess a message. 1x 5x8x
- 25. DATABASE BACKEND MAINTENANCE STRATEGIES Default Setting Preferred Configuration • The default Apache Derby option is for quick deployment and testing. • Mirth Corp recommends PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, or SQL Server. • These offer better performance, disk space efficiency, backup options, security, etc.
- 27. POLL #3
- 28. WRAPPING UP
- 29. ADDITIONAL RESOURCES “Best Practices and Vulnerabilities in Mirth Connect” white paper Google “Mirth Connect Security White Paper Galen” “Mirth Connect - Introduction” webcast Search “Mirth Connect Galen” on Youtube “10 Tips and Tricks To Make Mirth Connect Work For You” blog post Google “Mirth Connect Tips and Tricks Galen”
- 30. Confidential © 2015 Galen Healthcare Solutions SOLVING FOR TODAY. PREPARING FOR TOMORROW. Thank you for joining us today. To access the slides from today’s presentation, please visit: http://wiki.galenhealthcare.com/Category:Webcasts For additional assistance or to request information about our many products and services, including help with Mirth Connect, please contact us through our website: www.galenhealthcare.com
Editor's Notes
- #2: Good afternoon TITLE 2nd webcast on mirth connect, last one was about Today’s webcast is more technical and a result of what we’ve learned over the past two years working
- #5: Which interface engine does you organization currently use?
- #6: Performance tweaks = tricks you can use to speed up Mirth and minimize disk space waste Security improvements = encrypting messages stored on your server, protecting access to Mirth itself, and a little bit on importing certificates for SSL Programming suggestions = snippets of Javascript code that can improve your processes such as channel deployment between different development and production environments, abstracting to a central location common channel settings, using Javascript libraries in Mirth, and more Maintenance strategies = database back ends, making XML variables and logs easier to read in Mirth, and a little bit more on disk space usage
- #8: An essential element to configure in Mirth. Add information to the channel messages screen. Channel summary screen shows the Custom Metadata settings. Add clarity to message logs but all minimize storage needs.
- #10: What are recommended settings?
- #14: If you want to send data securely via an HTTP POST, you can do so by sending data to an HTTPS address. In the event that this address has a self-signed SSL certificate, you’ll want to import it into the Java Truststore on your computer. This Truststore is a file located in the /lib/security/ folder of the Java Program Files folder on the server where Mirth is installed. To edit your Truststore, there is a free application called Portecle that you can download from SourceForge.net. This is actually a Java Virtual Application, so you don’t need to install anything. Just unzip the folder that it comes in, and run the portecle.jar file as Administrator to give the application the permissions it needs to change the Truststore. On this slide you can see some screenshots showing how to import the certificate you need. Note that the little red X on the lock icon will still appear next to your HTTP Sender URL even after you have successfully imported the certificate, which can be misleading, because your data will be encrypted outgoing. Mirth Corp recommends you install their SSL Manager extension to have better certificate management on your machine. This, however, requires a paid support license with Mirth.
- #16: Before we dive into some more technical aspects of Mirth, I wanted to get an idea of how much experience do you have with the Mirth Connect Interface Engine?
- #18: WALK THROUGH CODE
- #25: Development: Content: all -- raw, transformed, encoded, sent, response, response transformed, processed response, maps
- #28: Is your organization currently evaluating migrating to a different interface engine?
- #29: QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS – Any other questions I didn’t answer today I will try to follow up with individually