InterSystems IRIS for Health

What do you like best about the product?

As a developer and system administrator in the healthcare sector, I've been using the product for many years and I think the strengths of InterSystems IRIS for Health are it's robustness, performance and an easy to use,rich healthcare standards implementation (e.g. HL7 v2.x, DICOM).

What do you dislike about the product?

It requires a significant amount of effort to achieve a comfortable level of proficiency with the product. For beginners, the MUMPS legacy, together with object oriented concepts in ObjectScript (such as multiple inheritance), may be daunting. Though embedded Python, a recent addition, may alleviate this, the product roots are still very present.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I've been successfully implementing the following in two medium sized (approx. 1000 beds) hospitals in Belgium using InterSystems IRIS for Health :

- patient demographic and admission/discharge/transfer data, transforming and filtering
- appointment data transforming and filtering, following patient consultation pathway
- document processing : route document (reports, results, ...) from various sources to document archive, and reference them in health records
- master file management and distribution (practitioners, procedures, locations, etc.)
- patient consultation registration workflow, mixing machine (kiosk) and human (desk) interactions
- interfacing with third party APIs (SOAP, REST)
- interfacing with medical devices (monitoring systems, DICOM modalities, ...)
- interfacing with legacy systems such as IBM DB2 database

What do you like best about the product?

I use IRIS for Health almost every day, and what I like most is how much it simplifies working with healthcare data. Things like HL7 and FHIR, which are usually a headache to deal with, are much easier here because the platform handles a lot of the heavy lifting.

It’s also great that everything you need is in one place — database, integration engine, message routing, and even analytics. Once you're familiar with the environment, it’s pretty straightforward to implement solutions. This really speeds up development and reduces back-and-forth between systems.

The customer support from InterSystems is generally responsive and helpful, especially when it comes to urgent production issues. They do take healthcare seriously, so you usually get solid answers.

For more technical or niche problems, the turnaround time can vary, and sometimes it feels like you’re waiting on engineering or digging through documentation yourself. There’s not as much community content or Stack Overflow presence compared to other platforms, so you're mostly relying on official channels. It would be great to see more real-world examples and quicker resolution on complex tickets.

What do you dislike about the product?

The main downside is the learning curve. If you’re new to IRIS or ObjectScript, it can feel unfamiliar and a bit old-school compared to more widely-used languages like Python or JavaScript. It takes time to get comfortable.

Setting up your first few productions or integrations can feel a bit overwhelming without the right guidance. Also, since it’s a licensed product, cost and access can be a concern — especially for smaller teams or if you're trying to build a quick prototype. More beginner-friendly examples and community support would really help ease adoption.

for more technical or niche problems, the turnaround time can vary, and sometimes it feels like you’re waiting on engineering or digging through documentation yourself. There’s not as much community content or Stack Overflow presence compared to other platforms, so you're mostly relying on official channels. It would be great to see more real-world examples and quicker resolution on complex tickets.

The built-in tools for message routing, transformations, and monitoring are very handy. You don’t need to use separate software for each function — it’s all there in one place. That said, the initial learning curve can slow you down a bit if you're new to the InterSystems way of doing things, but once you’re used to it, integration work becomes pretty smooth and repeatable.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

InterSystems IRIS for Health is solving one of the biggest challenges in healthcare IT — integrating multiple systems that all speak different data formats and protocols like HL7, FHIR, JSON, and XML. In a typical hospital environment, there are many moving parts: lab systems, electronic medical records (EMRs), pharmacy systems, radiology modules, and more. Each of these systems may use different standards or interfaces, making communication between them complex and time-consuming to manage.

IRIS for Health simplifies this by providing a unified platform with built-in capabilities for parsing, transforming, and routing healthcare messages. Instead of spending hours writing custom code or managing multiple third-party tools, we can quickly set up and maintain interfaces directly within IRIS. This reduces development overhead and increases consistency across systems.

Another major benefit is how IRIS centralizes our workflows. Traditionally, we’d rely on separate tools for database management, integration, scripting, and monitoring — but IRIS brings all of these into one environment. This not only streamlines our architecture but also improves traceability, troubleshooting, and overall system reliability.

From a productivity standpoint, it’s made a big difference. Tasks that used to take days can now be completed in hours, and the risk of human error is significantly lower. It’s also easier to scale and maintain over time. Overall, IRIS for Health enhances both the performance of our integrations and the efficiency of our development team.

What do you like best about the product?

If you’ve ever worked in healthcare IT, you know how messy and fragmented data can be. Getting different systems to talk to each other lab systems, EHRs, imaging platforms can feel like trying to get a group of people who speak different languages to sing in harmony. That’s where InterSystems IRIS for Health steps in. This platform was built with healthcare in mind. It’s not a general-purpose tool trying to wedge its way into the industry. IRIS for Health is specifically designed to handle the complex world of clinical data, and it does it well assuming you’re ready for a bit of a learning curve. It is Fast and Scalable. FHIR Made (Relatively) Easy. Data analytics is also very easy here as the data is stored in a very structured manner.

What do you dislike about the product?

1. Enterprise-Level Pricing.
2. Smaller Developer Community

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

There is no specific business related problems when it comes to IRIS for Health. It is just that the developer community is quite small and requires a lot of research for bug fixes.

What do you like best about the product?

Intersystems provides a robust solution for the industry. There's lots of information, documentation, videos, and online learning to discover everything there is about each of their products.

All of their products can be set up to work right out of the box, and customization is available to meet anyone's business needs.

Their WRC and technical support are thoroughly knowledgeable and quick to respond.

What do you dislike about the product?

Some of the naming conventions cam be confusing, but do not let that stop you.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Integrating disparate systems into one cohesive supportable platform. As a long time consultant to the Veterans Adminsitration, IRIS for Health has addressed some of the long standing challenges of working across the largest health care enterprise in the country.

What do you like best about the product?

Everyone we work with at InterSystems is both knowledgeable and helpful. Even if they don't know the answer to a question, they are more than happy to pull in the right resources to help answer your question. This has made our initial setup of IRIS and our cutover with currently integrated customers a breeze.

What do you dislike about the product?

Every so often, we are surprised with some of the issues we run into. As an example, we've had quite a few issues setting up Source Control. Throughout that time, InterSystems has been more than happy to meet with us and work through the issues, but it was a little surprising that we were the first group to encounter some of the issues.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

IRIS is helping us scale. We are switching from Mirth to IRIS to provide a better platform for our team to work from and make it simpler to integrate with other organizations.