Cloud hosting for healthcare integration engines is very tempting – low upfront costs, buzz around signing BAAs, and “unlimited” scaling. Sounds great, but are the big-brand cloud hosting infrastructures ready to support the robust healthcare integration engine hosting demands for technology solutions like Mirth Connect / Nextgen Connect? After digging in pretty deep into big-brand cloud hosting capabilities, we say “no” and here’s why.

Top Six Reasons Why Big-Brand Cloud Hosting Platforms are Not Great for Hosting Healthcare Integration Engines like Mirth Connect

1. Sales buzz about signing BAAs and HITRUST is just…buzz.

Want to get them to sign your BAA?  Not going to happen.

Need them to complete a Security Assessment  Questionnaire? Good luck.

And for those with healthcare-specific offerings, they are not the low-cost options that got you interested in the first place. Most rely on 3rd party cloud managed services companies to fill the healthcare-specific security gaps in the big-brand cloud offerings.

2. AWS, Google and Azure Cloud offerings love to get data in; and love to charge for data OUT.

By definition, integration engines move data in and out of the Cloud since they are moving data between a broad range of software applications that live in different environments.

Since the big-brand Cloud hosting vendors charge extra fees for any data that leaves their cloud, you can expect extra costs that are hard to predict. This problem can really be a budget buster!

3. Integration engines hosting requires high volume, real-time transaction support.

The most common limiter for the performance of integration engines like Mirth Connect is not CPU or RAM but is most often IOPS (the ability to read/write data quickly). The big-brand cloud hosting infrastructures are not designed for heavy real-time transaction volume like an interface engine.

Speed of available disk plus latency of cloud database services become a major performance bottleneck for Mirth Connect. Unfortunately, this is a problem you may not recognize until it’s too late to cost-effectively resolve.

4. Surprisingly high total cost of ownership for cloud hosting.

When thinking about the total cost of ownership, you can’t forget to include the cost of managing and securing these cloud environments. Many people find that they lack the in-house expertise of how to properly manage and secure their cloud environments and end up having to outsource this critical component, adding additional unexpected costs.

In addition, the downside of the ease of adding Cloud resources is the need to manage this process. “Provisioning and then forgetting” is a recipe for cost overruns. The other issue is bundled resources.  You often end up having to buy more resources than you need because you have to purchase prepackaged tiers, instead of just paying for exactly what you need.

5. Cloud hosting clustering benefits may have a limited impact for Integration Engines.

Much of the value of a big-brand cloud hosting platform revolves around their scalability and ease of database clustering and even automatically adding more processing nodes as needed. However, for healthcare HL7v2 messaging, maintaining the “message order” for sequential processing is essential.

Unfortunately, many interface engines, including the open-source version of Mirth Connect, do not natively support proper message handling for clusters deployed by AWS, Google or Azure Cloud platforms.

6. Limited (if any) database performance control with standard cloud hosting.

Open-source interface engines rely heavily on databases like PostgreSQL. And with high volume message processing, the database will experience very high transaction volumes. To ensure a stable and performant interface engine instance, proper database management and optimization is critical.

Big-brand cloud database services often do not allow you the granular level of control needed to optimize these settings, and cannot always guarantee the database server will have the “horsepower” to keep up with these tasks.

Well…Now What?

If big-brand cloud services aren’t ready for your interface engine, what options do you have? That’s where Zen’s integration as a service platform (called Gemini) comes in. Imagine a cloud service built by healthcare interoperability experts, just for healthcare data exchange. Zen’s Gemini integration platform service brings you all the benefits of a big-brand cloud, but in a private cloud designed just for processing healthcare messages. And it includes full managed IT and security services – no extra charge.  We’ll even fully manage your interfaces if you like.

Wanna find out more? Use this link to pick a day and a time to speak directly with an integration engineer at Zen.

Need more insights into Mirth Connect best practices?  Learn more from Zen’s exclusive Guide to Mirth Connect for Vendors resource.

About Zen:

Zen Healthcare IT is an interoperability technology and consulting firm. Zen helps all stakeholders in healthcare – vendors, providers, payers, HIEs, and ACOs – simplify interoperability. Using technology tools and years of interface development and support experience, Zen’s solution architects and engineers design and build use-case driven solutions for health information exchange.

The Zen team solves problems ranging from data acquisition, data normalization and aggregation, and data delivery challenges. Zen’s national client-base leverages Zen’s broad range of services, on-demand engineering, and disruptive Gemini Integration as a Service platform helps overcome interoperability obstacles and creates sustainable health information exchange infrastructures. Learn more at www.consultzen.com.