Multiple connections to Medent

[Peter Heggie]

We send ADT to a provider billing company that uses the Medent system / software over vpn. It has always been a sore spot because they send an ACK and then close the connection for every message. It takes about 5 seconds before they accept a new connection. Several times over the past few years we have asked them to employ a more ‘standard’ protocol in terms of leaving a connection open, but they have always refused.

It is not unusual to see 4k to 5k messages building up in the outbound thread during the day, and the slower time at night allows the thread to catch up and reach a depth of zero by morning. But over time our overall patient volumes have risen to a point we reached a few days ago where the thread count never gets to 0.

They have stated that an alternative is to have multiple connections to them, and that many hospitals use this technique. I took a brief look at the different protocols available for tcp/ip and mlp and I don’t see anything about multiple client connections outbound to a single server.

How can I send multiple, simultaneous messages to a server without sending the same message more than once?

Peter

Peter Heggie
PeterHeggie@crouse.org

Topic

[Jerry Tilsley]

One technique might be to create a second connection or more if necessary.  Then use a global variable in a TrxID UPoC to hold a value indicating the last location you sent a message.  Then you can send the current message to one of the other connections and just update your global variable to indicate this.

Lets say you have inbound1, outbound1, outbound2, outbound3.  You receive the data on inbound1 and wish to round-robin the incoming data between outbound1, outbound2, and outbound3.

When message one comes in you set the trxid to something that routes to outbound1 then update the global variable to 1, next message comes in you look at the variable and see a 1, so you set the trxid to something that routes to outbound2 and update the global variable.  On the third message you do that same as before updating the global to 3.  Whenever you see a value of 3 in the global you route to a trxid that routes to outbound1 and reset the global to 1.  

This way you can spread the messages across three connections going to the same vendor without sending the same more than once.  Granted I have never had to do this as this is a strange way to tackle the problem.  From what I see this should work.

Hope this helps a little!

Jerry

[Peter Heggie]

Thank you, yes I was thinking of using the trxid. I hadn’t thought of using a global variable – that really simplifies the code. Nice.

So it looks like we need a thread for each connection. We have to pay for each thread; I don’t think we should eat this cost, so I’m going to kick this up to management. We are looking at adding an affiliated hospital’s feed to this same destination, so it is even more urgent (and costly).

Peter

Peter Heggie
PeterHeggie@crouse.org

[Bob Richardson]

Greetings,

The global solution is somthing that we did to balance out sending messages to a remote vendor for processing as well.  Just be aware that when you cycle your processes the global is reset.

Ok.  With that said I applaud your intention to kick this up to your management decision makers.  It is arrogant and a lack of good customer service to make you pay for poor service.

We had that problem with a vendor once.  Found a new vendor and started moving our business to the new vendor – used Cloverleaf interfaces to the new vendor.   Well, the old vendor got excited and offered us a discount to keep what business remained with them!

Ding the wallet and you get results.

Good luck, good hunting!

[Author]

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