Experiences with Mirth

Integration engines are a crucial piece of the health care information technology puzzle. Health care organizations like hospitals and clinics are faced with vast amounts of data and a slew of interchange standards and protocols when addressing the issue of exchanging data between information systems. This paper describes our experience in developing Mirth, a popular open source health care messaging integration engine. Based on a unique client-server and enterprise service bus hybrid architecture, Mirth supports the development of interfaces for moving data between two or more systems. We describe the Mirth architecture in detail and discuss our experiences through several case studies that demonstrate its use. We also provide our insights gained in designing the Mirth architecture through several lessons learned.