Tag Archives: interface

The Return of Internet Explorer

 ·  by Art  · 1 Comment

Yes, it’s true. With the latest release of Iguana, version 5.0.9, Internet Explorer 8 and 9 are now officially supported (again)!

For those of you who read our blog and/or our wiki, you probably know that we have a bit of a love-hate relationship with IE around the office.

Editor’s Note: Since this article was published there was a recount and it’s actually just a hate relationship: the first ballot was confusing to some of our more “senior” team members.

Anyone with experience in web development can tell you that supporting IE – particularly the older versions like IE6 and IE7 – requires a significant amount of trickery, hacks and effort. That support often means sacrificing development hours that could be spent on features, innovations and optimizations. It’s a burden that many developers would be happy to live without.

That’s why, a few years back, we saw a surge in anti-IE campaigns springing up across the web. You may remember campaigns like:

http://www.ie6nomore.com
http://hey-it.com/

That was a fun grassroots movement which was embraced by everyone from small start-ups all the way up to the likes of Google.  Within the healthcare IT and enterprise world however, it’s definitely a case of easier-said-than-done.

When you’re dealing with major institutions and hospitals, it’s occasionally impossible for the individual user or the integration team as a whole to use anything other that IE. So, while on a personal level we might not love IE, today we are releasing the latest version of Iguana with support for IE8 and IE9. We’ll continue listening and working to ensure all of our corporate users – including those who run IE – are able to take advantage of Iguana and all of the amazing features of the Iguana Translator.

We’d love to hear from the community though. What do you think? Is IE still the dominant browser in your office? Is it IE8 or IE9 – or are you still using the dreaded IE6?

You can download Iguana 5.0.9 today. Happy browsing and integrating!

-Art

How does HL7 work?

 ·  by Art  · 16 Comments

Whenever I travel for work, one of the most common questions I hear is “How does HL7 work?”

HL7 is not always one of the sexiest subjects, but as interoperability and connectivity continue to be huge drivers in the health care space, the questions of HL7 are going to continue to be asked.

So, after a little thought, I thought I’d create a fun – and hopefully useful – video describing what HL7 is and what it does.

Sending HL7 Messages – The Movie

 ·  by Art  · 3 Comments

In keeping with our goal to provide the best possible service, documentation and support to all of our customers, I thought I’d take some time to create a second video in my “The Movie” series.  A sequel, if you will,  to the original: HL7 Demo – The Movie.

This time around, I wanted to show the creation of an outbound HL7 interface but was hoping I could “jazz” up the process a little while showing the ease of our tools.

The video only runs about 7 minutes, but in that short amount of time, I’m able to take the data from my database, map it into HL7 messages and configure Iguana to send my HL7 feed out to a receiving application (in this case, the HL7 listener).

Ignoring Duplicate HL7 Messages

 ·  by Art  · Leave a comment

Sometimes – regardless of how advanced our software, hardware and networks become – it’s the simplest of problems that give us the biggest headaches.

That was the case for a few of our customers recently.  After taking the time to build, test and deploy their interfaces, they were faced with a situation they hadn’t prepared for:  What to do when duplicate messages were sent to one of their channels?

This may not seem like a huge issue when a message is accidentally sent twice – but imagine what would happen if, like a broken record, that same message was sent 100, 1000 or even 1,000,000 times.  That’s a lot of needless stress to place on your database when all you’d be doing is updating an identical record.

Up for Air after HIMSS

 ·  by Eliot  · Leave a comment

HIMSS was a blast – I’m just back into the swing of things again in Toronto.  For the last two weeks I’ve been busy interviewing developers – I guess I ought to delegate that task.  But the choice of people you hire seems to be one of the most important things one can do in a software company so I still like to be hands on in this area.  If you know anyone, we’re looking for people with top notch C++ skills and/or web interface AJAX type skillsets (it’s odd to get these two skill sets together so we’ll consider either or).

Thanks to everyone that made the effort to visit us at HIMSS and I apologize for some of you who dropped by when I was busy during demos.  We got a lot more traffic than we anticipated and think most of us didn’t get the time to walk the floor, etc. as much as we hoped.  Next time we’ll staff the booth up more – it felt hard to step away.

I guess for me it was a clear validation we’d picked the right strategy with our focus on Iguana 4.0.  Over the last year and half I spent an awful lot of time talking to customers, understanding where the practical issues occur and figuring out how we could solve them.  Inside the company we spent hours agonizing over the UI and usability issues.  To be honest, I was not certain if customers would value all the effort we put into the product in that area – but to judge from the reaction at HIMSS we got an overwhelming vote of confidence.