InterSystems HealthShare vs. MarkLogic Server

InterSystems HealthShare is an extremely powerful platform for which we have not found a need it cannot meet. Granted, some particular complex solutions may require a bit more 'engineering' level talent than some healthcare organizations staff in their traditional 'interface departments'. Organizations that make the investment in InterSystems AND their staff through training and empowerment of bettering their career will rapidly reap the rewards of a robust integration foundation with support for rapidly increasing the organization's ability to action their data using analytics, natural language processing, machine learning and business process orchestration. Through HealthShare, I have been able to harvest key business and clinical metrics rapidly from plain text blobs into discrete data elements, empowering our analytic users, reducing manual data entry and bettering the lives of our most important customer - the patient.

Incentivized

If you are storing META data then MarkLogic is super useful as it retrieves everything so fast, while storing the whole data shows performance issues some times. If you have legacy systems then migrating from it would really require sweat and blood, on the other hand if you are in systems like Node.js you can simply integrate two systems easily. If you don't know how in the end your your data schema will look like then it's better to make a prototype using MarkLogic.

Incentivized

• A wealth of specific integration adaptors provided with the product, allowing for rapid low-code integrations for a myriad of use-cases.
• Most InterSystems provided functionality delivered with the product can be review and extended to allow for rapid development of custom solutions for adaptors and tools not met out-of-the-box.
• Continual timely releases ensure organizations can keep up to date with the rapidly changing healthcare integration space, while trusting that upgrades do not mean months of testing and validation. Most major upgrades can be completed within a few weeks of simple unit testing.

Incentivized

• Search was really advanced. Hard to set up and had limitations about semantical meanings between xml nodes, but provided very good search abilities.
• The organization of documents across collections and metadata was particularly useful.
• The REST abilities were very advanced and worked with XQuery well.

Incentivized

• Improvements to built in REST, SOAP and FHIR adapters to allow for low-code solutions against modern integration web service APIs.
• Terminology engine improvements to provide auto-mapping against the plethora of terminology datasets required by FHIR and US CDI standards.
• Tighter integration with Git/GitHub and similar platforms to enable Continuous Integration and Development models out of the box not only for general developers but healthcare integrators.

Incentivized

• MarkLogic still has a long way to go in fostering the developer community. Many developers are gravitating to the simple integrations and do not delve into the deeper capabilities. They have made tremendous strides in recent months and I am sure this will improve over time.
• Many of the best features are left on the floor by enterprises who end up implementing MarkLogic as a data store. MarkLogic needs to help customers find ways to better leverage their investment and be more creative in how they use the product.
• Licensing costs become a major hurdle for adoption. The pricing model has improved for basic implementations, but the costs seem very prohibitive for some verticals and for some of the most advanced features.

Incentivized

MarkLogic is expensive but solid. While we use open source for almost everything else, the backend database is too critically important. At this point, re-tooling for a different back end would take too much time to be a viable option.

Incentivized

Very little about it can be done better or with greater ease. Even things that seem difficult aren't really that bad. There's multiple ways to accomplish any admin task. MarkLogic requires a fraction of administrative effort that you see with enterprise RDBMS like Oracle. MarkLogic is continually improving the tools to simplify cluster configuration and maintenance.

Incentivized

There's always room for improvement. Some problems get solved faster than others, of course. MarkLogic's direct support is very responsive and professional. If they can't help immediately, they always have good feedback and are eager to receive information and details to work to replicate the problem. They are quick to escalate major support issues and production show-stopping problems. In addition to MarkLogic's direct support, there are several employees who are very active among the community and many questions and common issues get quick attention from helpful responses to email and StackOverflow questions.

Incentivized

InterSystems HealthShare is not your standard integration platform. While the Health Connect product could be construed as an 'interface engine', it is so much more. The capabilities to extend the engine using low code and visual business process modeling ensures a wealth of use cases not covered by a traditional interface engine. Furthermore, while not a direct competitor of Epic (Epic is in fact an InterSystems customer themselves), we are far more comfortable relying on the robustness of the HealthShare platform for complex integrations, data modeling and data normalization using HealthShare than just Bridges and Interconnect alone.

Incentivized

We had Fast in place when Microsoft had bought it up and was going to change / deprecate it. One of the biggest advantages of MarkLogic for search actually had to do with the rest of the content pipeline - it allowed us to have it all in one technology. On the NoSQL side, we looked at MongoDB a couple years back. At that time, MarkLogic came in stronger on indexing, transaction reliability, and DR options. For us, that was worth using a commercial product.

Incentivized

• Simple integration development time has been reduced from weeks to days.
• Complex integration development time has been reduced from months to weeks.
• On-call Support after-hours for the integration team has been nearly non-existent since the move to InterSystems, increasing employee retention and satisfaction as InterSystems 'just works'.
• Less need to purchase other products to implement complex integrations through web service APIs and SQL ETL processes - it can all be done with InterSystems.

Incentivized

• MarkLogic reduced the amount of time that the DevOps team needed to dedicate to database updates, as the engineering team was mostly able to easily design and maintain database upgrades without requiring specialists such as database architects on the DevOps side. This capability flowed from the product's speed and the versatility of its XQuery language and libraries.
• MarkLogic required significant education and buy-in time for the engineering team.

Incentivized