Medical-Objects Integrates Using AS2 and SOAP
August 26th, 2006 andrewAt the recent Australian HIC 2006 Conference Medical-objects was involved in some way with virtually every scenario in the Interoperability demo. In fact the demo ran on the new realtime HL7 client Capricorn.
As usual many lessons were learned, more than in months of internal testing. The value of standards was again demonstrated. Integration with the Sun Microsystems Identity Service was achieved using a brand new implementation of AS2 (rfc 4130) which worked flawlessly with minimal tweaking. Getting this level of interoperability without a written standard would have taken weeks of testing. In this case it took 2 days of testing and tweaking to make it run flawlessly.
Medical-Objects also generated the display HTML for the IBM XDS (Cross document sharing) demonstration without any pre-conference testing by using a SOAP based web service. This was not even housed in the same physical location, but again was working after the 2 day setup period without any changes to the SOAP service.
While virtually all the interactions at the demo required 2 days of tweaking, they were all working in the end, something that would be impossible without standards based interfaces. While it appears to be popular to lament the flexibility and optionality in HL7 V2 this demonstration proves that with some basic interface engine functionality at the borders, interoperability is not a pipe dream, but achievable in short time frames when a little effort is expended.