4 reasons to choose an open source integration engine for healthcare

Integration engines handle sensitive healthcare data, and they sit at the edge of the enterprise, where they're most vulnerable. Understandably, security is a major factor when choosing one.

But apart from security, here are 3 more reasons why healthcare organizations are better served by an open source integration engine than a closed source one.

1. More secure

Open code can be security tested. Eclipse Open Integration Engine (Eclipse OIE), the open source engine we support, is developed in public on GitHub.

And as an Eclipse Foundation project, it has the Foundation's vulnerability scanning capabilities behind it.

The Eclipse Foundation Security Team brings frontier AI models into vulnerability discovery alongside traditional security tooling. The aim is to find and fix long-hidden vulnerabilities before the same capabilities reach attackers.

The Security Team also gives the project leads early warning of any vulnerabilities identified. It supports coordinated disclosure, and advises on fixes and workarounds.

2. Lower total cost of ownership

A closed source engine comes with a license fee. Eclipse OIE has no license fee, and neither do its plugins.

If you want support, you pay for a product support contract instead, and ours are considerably cheaper than closed source licenses.

And support is a competitive market. The Eclipse OIE website lists 12 commercial support vendors, NovaMap Health among them, so you're never locked to one provider, and competition keeps costs down.

3. You're always in control

MPL 2.0 keeps Eclipse OIE freely available forever. And the Eclipse Foundation holds the project's name and marks, so no single vendor can change the license or put it behind a paywall.

So you're never forced to migrate away. And you don't have to fear that a single vendor will take you down a path where your integrations won't work on the open source version.

A closed source engine carries no such guarantee. Eclipse OIE exists because Mirth Connect™ was open source. When it moved to a commercial license starting with version 4.6, a small group of maintainers forked the last open source release, 4.5.2, and carried it forward.

4. The whole community's contributions

An open source engine gets the whole community's contributions, and they outstrip what a single vendor's R&D team can deliver. A closed source engine gets the investment its owner decides it warrants.

The Eclipse OIE plugin directory lists 9 plugins built by the community, including Role Based Access Control, OIE Sentinel for monitoring and alerting, version history for channels and code templates, and our TLS Manager Plugin for secure network communications.

The web administrator is a case in point. The people had long been asking for a browser-based way to administer and monitor the engine, and the community provided. Spearheaded by Christopher Gibson, one of the project leads, OIE's web interface project is now being actively developed and maintained.

The new interface can run in the engine's own web server, and includes full channel editing and message browser. Until then, administering the engine meant a Java Swing desktop client, installed on each user's machine.

You also get to share your own contributions, and see others benefit from them.

Where NovaMap fits

Open source does raise valid objections about support: which organization to turn to when something doesn't seem to be working, and how to get an SLA on vulnerability or clinical safety patches. Those are genuine gaps, and commercial support vendors close them. We are one of those vendors.

Our product support contracts come with an SLA, including SLA-backed response times for patches to critical issues, and we contribute those patches back to the open source project. We're ISO 27001:2022 and Cyber Essentials certified, and we operate under DCB0129 with a named Clinical Safety Officer.

The NHS Norfolk & Suffolk ICB is one example case study. They asked us to help them migrate from a licensed integration engine to Eclipse OIE, and signed a product support contract with us for ongoing assurance.

We contribute to the project too. We co-funded and developed the TLS Manager Plugin with Diridium Technologies, and our CEO, Paul Richardson, is one of the three project leads.

With us, you get the confidence of enterprise support and the freedom of open source.

Get started

Download Eclipse OIE and run it today, or spin up a free dev instance from the Portal. To talk about product support, email enquiries@novamap.health.

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This is independent, third-party work, not affiliated with NextGen Healthcare or Mirth Connect™. Mirth™ and Mirth Connect™ are registered trademarks of NXGN Management, LLC (NextGen Healthcare).