How Awell connects to other systems

Health Level Seven (HL7) and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) are the international standards for moving health information between systems, whatever format each system uses internally. Awell exchanges data in both, through an integration engine that translates at the boundary.

Awell is not a FHIR server

Awell does not store resources in HL7 or FHIR format.

Because Awell resources are converted to those formats on the way out and back, a translation layer always sits between Awell and anything speaking HL7 or FHIR. Querying Awell directly as if it were a FHIR server won't work.

The integration engine does the translating

Awell handles interoperability through an integration engine, usually the open-source MirthConnect.

Mirth is middleware between two health information systems, in this case Awell and the hospital's, converting between HL7, FHIR, XML and JSON so each end sends and receives in the format it expects.

Awell's team has built dozens of Mirth integrations with electronic medical record (EMR), electronic health record (EHR), lab and scheduling systems. A Mirth server can sit on the hospital side or the Awell side.

Common integrations built on Mirth

Integrations built so far include:

• Starting, updating or deleting a care flow based on messages from a hospital scheduling system, for example HL7 SIU. See Patient creation with SIU messages.
• Pulling patient demographics from a hospital system. See Patient Demographics Query.
• Sending reports back to the hospital, for example as HL7 ORU messages.

Next steps

Next: Ways to connect an EMR to choose a mechanism.