In Healthcare IT, there is a messaging protocol called HL7. It can be used to send nearly any healthcare based information between systems, such as appointments made, demographics updated, insurance information, lab results, etc. However, the protocol is not completely standard, and an connection between two systems (an interface) has to be configured by hand.
Mirth is an open source application built on the open source ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) Mule. It used the HL7 HAPI library--thus the name. Mirth's main use is helping connect systems that use HL7. But it can do much more--plain text, email, JDBC, DICOM, and so on. Any message can be copied, altered, disassembled, reassembled, sent on, and so on. The best part is that the UI is nice and clean, and makes setting up the connections, and processes the messages easy. You can also use Javascript to process the messages, and even create pure Java clases to proceses the message. So all that means nearly anything can be done withe the messages and the information in them. And that makes it great.
Here is a little example:
I had a system that sent appointment messages, but was not set up to send laterality information (right side or left side) about the appointment. So "X-ray Foot" instead of "X-ray Left Foot". The vendor could not or would not fix it. The information was locked up in a legacy system that did not use JDBC or ODBC--I think it was running on Cobol. So I wrote a Java class that could telnet to its terminal, and query its SQL like language. After adding the Java jar to the Mirth external library folder, I could have Mirth grab the each HL7 message, extract the appointment info, query the original system (via my custom class), get the laterality, change the appointment type name, and send it on.
I have numerous examples of Mirth letting me do the implausible; maybe I'll give more examples later. In all theses cases Mirth made it easy, and that it why it is one of my favorite applications.
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