WellSky Develops Seamless Integrations and Automates Deployment with Mirth Connect

The Challenge

WellSky, a global leader in care coordination, provides software, analytics, and services to improve outcomes and reduce costs for health and community care. In a value-based care environment, WellSky aids providers, payers, health systems, and community organizations in overcoming challenges, enhancing collaboration, and integrating clinical and social care. WellSky first began using the Mirth Connect core functionality six years ago in their Home and Post-acute business unit, which provides solutions for home health, hospice, and palliative care. Now, with a network of over 2,000 hospitals, 130,000 providers, and 20,000 social services organizations, WellSky must handle multiple variations in connectivity and data format requirements for their various vendors and partners. Therefore, WellSky needed to leverage automation and cloud-based services in order to efficiently scale and deploy integrations with clients, vendors, and partners. This led them to begin using the Mirth Connect Premium services.

The Solution

Mirth Connect Premium allows WellSky to explore functionalities that optimize their workflows. The advanced and enterprise-grade features include enhanced security tools, extensions that facilitate rapid implementation, and dedicated support services. Mirth Connect Premium’s built-in support for messaging protocols, authentication schemes, and data formats built a strong base for many of WellSky’s integrations. “For sending messages and receiving messages, we did not have to write any custom code or use additional applications or tools to handle message transport and authentication. This enabled us to build, deploy and deliver integrations at a faster rate.”, said Tellis B. Ellis, IV, Senior Staff Engineer at WellSky.

The impact of automation

The WellSky team quickly found automation to be one of Mirth Connect Premium’s biggest allies. Ellis explained that because Mirth channels can be exported and imported as text-based files (XML), their team developed tooling to automate the build of a fully functional Mirth channel from a template channel. “This eliminated the manual process of cloning an existing channel and making manual edits,” said Ellis. Mirth’s REST API enabled the development of an in-house tool for automated Mirth deployments. Ellis notes that, “Implementation timelines vary depending on the connectivity requirements (for example a VPN), whether any custom development is required, and the outcome of testing. Largely due to Mirth’s REST API and our tooling for automation, we have implemented interfaces in less than 3 months from project inception to go-live.” This in turn improves the entire deployment process and enables the creation of web-based deployment pipelines. Furthermore, automation has allowed the WellSky Professional Services team to play a greater role in the implementation process. This shift in responsibility from the engineering team to the services team has led to cost savings benefits at WellSky. Mirth’s advanced capabilities, coupled with automation, helped WellSky reduce the time and effort put towards building and deploying new integrations. This automation proved vital as they began managing workloads in the cloud. “WellSky’s Professional Services team is responsible for the majority of our interface implementations. With the automation implemented by our engineering team, the services team is able to quickly build and deploy channels without the involvement of engineering,” says Ellis.

The impact of the Dynamic License

When WellSky was facing struggles managing their license activations introduced with running Mirth in short-lived Docker containers, their NextGen Healthcare account representative encouraged them to consider adopting the Dynamic License to address the issue—flexible licensing that better aligns with the dynamic nature of cloud-based deployments. “The Dynamic License solved our problem. Without a Dynamic License, utilizing Docker in a cloud-based environment would not have been feasible from a licensing perspective,” said Ellis. Before the Dynamic License, with a traditional Mirth Connect license, each Mirth instance running in a Docker container consumes a license activation. This would require WellSky to track and deallocate these activations. Now, the Dynamic License has enabled WellSky to leverage Docker containers in their Mirth channel deployment pipelines.

The pipelines launch Mirth in Docker containers for validation of the channels. These containers are short-lived, with a duration of only a few minutes on average. “The Dynamic License has virtually eliminated our admin overhead for tracking license utilization for these ephemeral Mirth instances,” said Ellis.

The Results

With all the improvements they’ve made in their six years working with Mirth, the WellSky team is still developing and looking ahead. Most recently, in June, they implemented a fully automated Mirth 4.5 upgrade that was executed through a web- based UI. This upgrade was built upon the tooling that they developed to work with Mirth REST API and the support in the Mirth installer for unattended execution. The automated upgrade provided a repeatable process that eliminated the possibility of errors that can occur from manual execution. Furthermore, the automation reduced the overall time for the upgrade because it enabled the upgrade for multiple Mirth instances to be executed in parallel. Ellis considers the automated upgrade “a huge win for us.” He also noted that the automation alleviated any required assistance from WellSky’s IT team, who were quite happy to not be involved in another upgrade project.

Plans on the horizon

WellSky plans to continue embracing the automation that has helped propel them to this point. Future plans for automated Mirth performance testing and automated Mirth integration testing will ensure that any regressions in performance or functionality are identified and resolved prior to deployment into their productions systems. They also hope to integrate Mirth with other types of cloud-based services, such as messaging systems and data streaming services. WellSky plans to instrument it’s Mirth channels to publish metrics on Mirth activity, health, and performance to cloud-based monitoring systems. Furthermore, WellSky plans to evaluate migrating to a Kubernetes- based Mirth deployment that leverages the Mirth Advanced Clustering plugin. Above all, WellSky’s future centers on improving efficiency and quality through automation and the use of cloud-based services to advance their mission. Ellis emphasizes that, “enabling efficient and scalable integration between our back-end services, our vendors, and our partners is a key competitive differentiator for us.”