Modern Healthcare Integration in the Wake of NextGen's Announcement

This week, NextGen Healthcare announced that Mirth Connect, the healthcare integration engine that has been a cornerstone of interoperability for countless organizations, will no longer be available. As long-time healthcare integration engineers ourselves, we recognize this news creates significant uncertainty for the many organizations that rely on Mirth Connect for critical healthcare workflows.

Honoring Mirth's Legacy​

First, we want to acknowledge Mirth Connect's tremendous contribution to healthcare interoperability. For more than a decade, Mirth has enabled healthcare data exchange for organizations of all sizes, from small clinics to large hospital systems. It helped usher in an era of digital healthcare, and many of us at Medplum have deep experience with Mirth throughout our careers.

Moving Forward: Why Consider Medplum​

As healthcare organizations evaluate their options, we believe Medplum offers a modern, future-proof alternative for many Mirth use cases. While we're developing a comprehensive comparison guide (coming soon), we wanted to highlight some key differences that make Medplum worth considering:

Cloud-Native Architecture with Local Protocol Support​

Mirth's on-premise model required maintaining local servers with all business logic and integration channels running on-site. Medplum takes a different approach:

• Medplum Agent: Our lightweight local component converts legacy protocols (HL7, DICOM, ASTM - coming soon!) into secure websockets, eliminating the need for VPNs while maintaining compatibility with local systems.
• Cloud Processing: Complex transformation logic runs in the cloud using modern JavaScript/TypeScript through Medplum Bots, improving maintainability and scalability.

Modern Technology Stack​

One of Mirth's challenges has been its reliance on aging Java versions and custom Rhino JavaScript implementations. Medplum is built on a continuously maintained modern tech stack:

• TypeScript/JavaScript: Industry-standard languages that are widely understood and have robust tooling
• Regular Security Updates: Weekly dependency upgrades and proactive security maintenance
• Compliance Ready: SOC2 Type 2 certified with ONC certifications and HITRUST certification in progress

Open Source​

Like Mirth in its early days, Medplum is committed to open source. Our core platform is Apache 2 licensed, giving you the freedom to use, modify, and deploy as needed without vendor lock-in.

Designed for Today's Healthcare Integration Challenges​

Medplum was built by experienced healthcare engineers who have suffered through the limitations of previous-generation integration engines:

• FHIR-Native: Though we support HL7v2 and other formats, we embrace modern FHIR standards
• Developer Experience: Purpose-built for the way modern healthcare applications are developed
• Scalability: Designed from the ground up for horizontal scaling across cloud environments

Next Steps for Mirth Users​

We understand that migrating from a system as essential as Mirth requires careful planning. In the coming weeks, we'll publish a comprehensive guide for Mirth users considering Medplum, including:

• Detailed feature comparisons
• Migration strategies and patterns
• Technical implementation guidance
• Case studies from organizations who have made similar transitions

In the meantime, we invite you to:

• Join our Discord community where you can connect with our team and other healthcare developers
• Explore our documentation to understand Medplum's capabilities
• Try our sandbox environment to experiment with the platform

We're Here to Help​

As fellow healthcare interoperability enthusiasts, we understand the challenges you're facing. Whether you ultimately choose Medplum or another path forward, we're committed to supporting the healthcare integration community through this transition.

Look for our comprehensive Mirth to Medplum comparison guide in the coming days, and please reach out if we can assist with your evaluation process.

Medplum is an open-source healthcare development platform that provides infrastructure and tools for rapidly building compliant healthcare applications. Learn more at medplum.com.

We've heard many success stories from enthusiastic early adopters who have smoothly upgraded to v4. Thank you all for your support and your feedback in this process!

However, we've identified an issue affecting some Medplum deployments that are configured to automatically pull the :latest Docker tag. With our recent release of Medplum 4.0.0, these deployments may be caught in a failing deployment loop. This post explains why this is happening and how to resolve it.

Medplum v4.0.0 is coming soon! Many of the new features in this release have already been rolled out incrementally, making the v4.0.0 designation more symbolic of the semantic versioning. We prioritize stability and backwards compatibility and work hard to minimize unnecessary changes. However, sometimes changes are necessary to keep the platform up-to-date and secure. This document outlines the key updates in v4.0.0, including important information for self-hosting deployments and TypeScript SDK users.

On January 15, 2025 Medplum & Flexpa held a JPMorgan companion event for the community. During the event, there were demos of many different open source tools that aid in development for life science workflows.

On occasion, the Medplum team gives talks about our community, product and philosophy. You can find them here:

As we kick off 2025, we're excited to share Medplum's vision for the year ahead. Our open-source healthcare development platform has seen extraordinary growth, with our community of builders and innovators expanding rapidly throughout 2024:

As we close out 2024, the Medplum team would love to thank our community and customers for joining us on this journey.

If you've worked with FHIR before, you've probably noticed there are a lot of resources. And I mean a lot! At first glance, it might seem overwhelming to figure out how they all fit together. But here's the thing: once you understand a few core patterns, the whole system starts to make much more sense.

Today, let's talk about one of FHIR's clever organizational tricks: the Workflow module. It's an pattern overlaid onto resource types that helps unlock how different healthcare activities relate to each other. Whether you're building a scheduling system, managing prescriptions, or handling lab orders, these patterns will come in handy.

Medplum is built on Postgres. Until recently, our hosted Medplum service was using an Amazon Web Services (AWS) RDS Aurora Postgres cluster running version 12.16. Since v12 is rather outdated and nearing the end of its standard support window on RDS, it was time to plan our upgrade to the newest version available on RDS, v16.4. Various methods to upgrade to a new major version on various places across the downtime vs level-of-effort continuum; we decided to upgrade our database with no downtime. This is how we did it.

Awell is a low-code platform designed to enable your clinical teams to design, operate and continuously improve your care flows with minimal engineering lift.