Designing and implementing a HIS/EMRa platform for Dr Agarwal’s Eye Hospital
A case study on how Ideas2IT, a product engineering firm based in Chennai, designed and implemented Ideamed, a comprehensive and HIS/EMR product at eyecare player Dr Agarwal's 90+ hospitals across India and 11 countries in Africa, handling complexities arising from differing currencies, tax regulations and compliance requirements, to catalogue the landscape of applications and data flow requirements.Dr Agarwal’s Eye Hospital was founded by Padma Bhushan awardee late Dr. Jaiveer Agarwal and his wife Dr Tahira Agarwal in Chennai, India, in 1957. Over the last six decades, the group has reportedly grown into one of the largest network of eye-care centres in India and Africa, in addition to Mauritius. Dr Agarwal’s Eye Hospitals are also present across 10 states of India, with the flagship centres at Chennai. Over the last five years, Dr Agarwal’s Eye Hospitals has expanded rapidly into new geographies and new countries - both through greenfield ventures as well as mergers and acquisitions, backed by a strong management team, marquee investors and the vision of the founders and the promoters. Headquartered in India and the US, Ideas2IT was founded in 2009 in Silicon Valley, California. Their team of exceptional software engineers use advanced and new-age technologies such as Machine Learning and AI, Cloud Native and IIoT to create innovative products and services for start-ups and enterprises. Ideamed is a comprehensive HIS/EMR built for customisation from the ground up by leveraging a low code platform. It has 32+ modules and 700+ screens to provide all the functionalities required to run a chain of hospitals. Ideamed was implemented at all Dr Agarwal's 90+ hospitals, with meticulous handling of the complexities arising from differing currencies, tax regulations, and compliance requirements.
The requirement
The implementation of Ideamed at Dr Agarwal's, required a holistic integration platform that could connect various enterprise systems across its IT landscape, catering to HIS, EMR, Procurement, Financials and more.
The solution
Ideas2IT ran a discovery project to catalogue the landscape of applications and data flow requirements. Based on the derivation from this exercise, the company designed a common integration platform on Mulesoft. Mulesoft was chosen for its robust architecture and support for multiple protocols and integration to the Spring framework.
Financial data
Ideamed HIS was reportedly enhanced to generate transactions relevant to financial ERP and post it to Mule. Mule would then map the HMS JSON to Oracle Netsuite format and proceed to integrate with Netsuite using the Netsuite connector. Using the Quartz Connector in Mule, data requested by the HMS is fetched from the Mule Database at specified time intervals and integration is done with the Netsuite system.
EHR data
As different EMRs supported different standards like HL7, FHIR, EDI, etc., the company leveraged MuleSoft's Anypoint Connectors to handle HL7 messages by using HL7 MLLP connector to send and receive messages and the HL7 EDI connector to interpret the HL7 message. Given that HL7 is a loosely defined standard and two different implementations of HL7 can represent data differently, Ideas2IT implemented a robust data mapping layer to map the source data format to a source neutral layer (SNL). Then, the SNL was mapped to the canonical data model of the Data Warehouse.
The benefits
The platform reportedly enabled seamless data flow between the various dominant systems in Dr Agarwal's IT landscape. This led to powerful end-to-end workflows and reporting.Read more
