Corepoint

• The Corepoint Integration Engine is a powerful tool that is intuitive and easy to learn to use. The customer service and technical support offered by this company is the best I’ve encountered in the Health IT industry. It is not surprising that this solution has become so dominant in the HL7 integration space.
• Would be nice if you didn’t have to license each individual capability.
• Corepoint is easy to use and their customer support is top notch.

Cloverleaf

• This is a very solid engine. We have had it running for multiple years with zero downtime (as in never patched, rebooted, etc). On the flip side, it is dated and some items, such as database integration, are possible, just very cumbersome.
• There is a lot you can do with Cloverleaf. It is expensive when you start adding different modules.
• Cloverleaf, at it’s very core, is extremely flexible. It can do everything we have ever thrown at it. We are a VLO and have literally thousands of connections. Great engine.

Rhapsody

• Easy to learn, use, and support. Scales up and down well to meet varying integration requirements. Does lack native clustering and federation needed for larger/wide-area implementations.
• We’ve had a few unexpected interfaces that we needed to implement quickly. Rhapsody makes configuring interfaces fairly easy.
• The engine is solid and runs continuously without problems. Routes work well. Training on specific tools and how they work with standards is lacking.

Mirth

• We’ve used Mirth for data conversions. It’s an open source tool, so the price point is right (free). However, the documentation needs to mature. They also offer a license, so I would be curious to see how the support is under the license.
• Mirth works well for us. However, it is frustrating to have to reinvent the wheel every time we need an interface.
• Certain features are available only to paid customers.

Ensemble

• Ensemble scales up easily and quickly. The purchase was a fixed cost. Adding interfaces does not add vendor costs. Expansive in its capability and functionality.
• What I did not like was that some of the development steps are basic and crude, but in later updates they added some user interface features that simplified the process of some of the functionality. One thing that was improved was searching for an HL7 message. I believe some other processes could still be refined. For instance, the process of moving tested interface components to production could be made simpler.
• Easy to use and transition from an older engine.
• InterSystems HealthConnect does a great job with simple interfaces that are one TCP/IP connection to another TCP/IP connection. The engine can get really unruly when you add in web services that require authentication or authorization that uses cutting edge security protocols. The initial support was very good, but the last couple incidents that we opened we have had to solve on our own.