If you’ve visited our Help Center recently, you may have noticed a few changes.
We tend to always have a number of projects in the works to improve our digital offerings, and a few weeks ago a number of these projects wrapped up and made it into production.
With all the changes, I thought I’d take a little time to explain a few of the most important – and useful – new areas.
1. Are you ready to share your code?
There’s one thing we’ve heard time-and-time again from our customers:
It would be amazing if there were a place where I could find and share code for interfaces that are of common interest to the global healthcare market.
Well, I might be overstating things. The actual quote is probably more like:
Dude, hasn’t someone done this before? I really don’t want to start from scratch.
Well, guess what? We listened. Not only did we listen, we went ahead and built a dedicated space just for code sharing! If you haven’t seen it yet, take some time to explore the code repository.
Right now, the code repository is home to a handful of our official modules and some of our pre-built channels. We’ve only just begun digging through our internal archives though. There’s so much more code – and interfaces – that we can share. So, over the next few months, I highly encourage you to keep an eye on the repo and make it one of your first stops when looking to start a new project.
Our code is only the beginning though.
The real value of the repository is that anyone – including you – can share code, VMDs and anything else you think is useful.
Think about it: If you’ve built an interface into EPIC, connected to Greenway Health’s API, integrated with athenahealth, created a generic CDA or just written an awesome data anonymizer — why not share it with the community? The more people that share, the more your collective work-lives become easier.
I know these things sometimes start off a little slow. No one wants to be the first person to share. So, if you’re reading this and think you’ve got something that might be useful, I strongly encourage you to just go for it. I think I can even find a special prize for the first 5 people who contribute!
2. There’s an API For that
We have a new browsable IGUANA API document (that’s version specific).
This one was really just a pet project of mine. For a few years now, I’ve wanted a clean single-page API reference of all of IGUANA’s functions. There’s a lot of amazing built-in modules that ship with IGUANA, but sometimes it’s hard to remember what they all are.
If you’re familiar with the “Underscore-G” trick (_G), you might already have found a handy way to browse the API inside the Translator, but if not, I think this new reference section is going to be your new best friend.
At the moment, the API only covers the translator-based functions, but moving forward, we plan to extend it to also include IGUANA’s server-level APIs.
Oh, and if you’re curious, I actually generated these HTML pages directly from IGUANA. I installed every version on my laptop and wrote a relatively simple LUA script to loop through the API and generate HTML to match our template. It was another fun example of just how open/flexible the IGUANA platform really is. For me, if there’s an automation task I want to accomplish – even when it has nothing to do with traditional healthcare interfaces – IGUANA is the first tool I load up.
3. Newsletters (x 2)
Another thing you may have noticed both here and on our Help Center, is the prominence of the Newsletter subscription box. We’ve retooled our newsletter program and are now (trying to) send 2 newsletters every month. One will be a “Blog Digest” that brings the best (and sometimes only) posts from the blog directly to your inbox. The other is a “Community Roundup”, where we’re highlighting trending articles, active discussions and new code submissions.
If you haven’t already, add your email to the list and have the best of our content sent directly to you each and every month.
4. There’s still more to come …
As I said at the beginning, we tend to always have 2-3 open projects at any given time. As such, there’s actually a lot more that’s still in the works. I can’t really get into what it’ll be, but one that will hopefully see the light-of-day soon is something pretty special on the training and interactive learning side of things.
Having said that, if there’s something you’ve always wanted in terms of documentation or material to get you and your projects started – please let us know. We already know how to use IGUANA — so it’s important to hear from those who aren’t as experienced since that’s what’s going to really help us improve things.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the recent additions!
-Art