Device Integration with Cloverleaf

Hi

I can give you some notes on what I have experienced.

We have integration setup between Phillips monitors and Epic, last I checked it was about 4 million msg per month.  We don’t save any SMAT for the reasons you mentioned, and have no message transformation going on, it is just a straight raw route of message between Phillips and Epic.
Messages into and across Cloverleaf flow smoothly, but we did run into issues on the Epic side sending all of the messages into a single AIP.  For some reason, for 5-10 minutes each day, there would be a delay getting the ack back from Epic.  This caused the outbound queue to skyrocket and take up to an hour to catch up, so they were seeing massive delays in the device data show up in Epic. I think it was some network issue, not Epic itself, but there was never a clear root cause for the delay so to overcome this we made some tweaks on the interface side of things:
The inbound processing was working fine, so we decided to create multiple outbound threads to spread the workload to Epic and do round-robin routing to send a message to each in turn.  This eliminated any outbound queues regardless of the inbound message volumes.
Multiple AIP’s were created in Epic  (copies of the original ) and new outbound threads added to each.
On the inbound thread:
Set the Trx ID Determination to be a new UPOC
Set up multiple named routes 0,1,2, etc
The UpOC keeps global count of which route to use (0 or 1 or 2 , etc)  and roll over back to 0 when the max number of routes is hit.

We set this up about 3 years ago and have not had any issue since.

Hope this helps

Hey, Jeff,

We’ve been doing device integration for years here.  Currently, we are on the same Cloverleaf platform as you are, and are also using Epic.  We have feeds from Philips IBE, and Capsule(technically also Philips).  I’ve attached a snippet of our NetConfig for our BMDI site, hopefully it will get through.  There are are also several other threads(ADT, fetal monitoring, etc…), but I just included the BMDI-type stuff.  We are a national health system, so our Philips IBE is split up by timezone, with the Eastern zone having four separate feeds due to volume.  These feed to four separate AIP’s.  The Capsule feeds are primarily by “Health Ministry”, which can be loosely translated to “hospitals geographically close to each other that share systems”.  These feed to four separate AIP’s.  There’s also some telemetry strip interfaces shown on the snippet.  Not super high volume, but VERY large messages.

We do save inbound messages, but whereas our “regular” sites(e.g. ADT, orders, results, etc…) keep a default of 7 days of SMAT Db history(although a few are longer), this site only keeps 3 days of SMAT Db history.  And yes, we do keep them on the same filesystem as Cloverleaf.  Our Cloverleaf filesystem is 4Tb.  We don’t keep them so much for resending, as for troubleshooting.  “Troubleshooting” mostly meaning “proving that we did indeed receive the message and forward it on”. ‘Cause you know it’s always an “interface problem”. 🙂

As for message volume, we don’t really track it.  As long as it keeps up, we don’t really care how many messages go through.  So I just did a quick-and-dirty look.  Which meant getting a rough count from a day’s worth of inbound SMAT DB’s, and came up with VERY VERY roughly 5.3M messages per day.

HTH,

TIM