4 ms·

Congratulations on launching this much-needed product! I've rolled my own webhooks several times, so I personally know all the pain points you mentioned. I wor

Congratulations on launching this much-needed product! I've rolled my own webhooks several times, so I personally know all the pain points you mentioned. I work in healthcare tech, and in the last couple years I've worked with legacy medical systems that use FTP to implement "pseudo-webhooks". For each integration with a third-party technology provider, there is a dedicated FTP server that reads/writes files to an FTP server owned by the third party. When this service is interrupted there is no retry logic - someone has to spend time manually checking if files made it across. If someone could make this legacy process easier on developers and HIPAA compliant they would be rewarded handsomely, as these organizations (hospitals, medical device makers, health-tech companies, etc) are comfortable paying enterprise-level prices for any technology they use.

tasn 6y ago
We are going to start working towards HIPAA soon, and we also going to offer a way to end-to-end encrypt the payload in the very near future. The encryption doesn't help with HIPAA (does it?), but it definitely helps with peace of mind and reducing the attack surface.
bradgessler 6y ago
Very interesting. What’s the best way to learn more about this problem? Are you working for a healthcare tech company integrating with these legacy systems via FTP, or are you working for a provider or insurance company’s IT organization trying to integrate with said legacy systems for in-house software? Is this what it would look like? https://docs.mulesoft.com/ftp-connector/1.5/ https://docs.mulesoft.com/ftp-connector/1.5/ If there’s any links or vendors you could share so I could learn about this I’d greatly appreciate it.
- primitivesuave 6y ago
  Happy to elaborate more for you. I work on the health tech side, so we’re integrating with legacy systems. I’d say there isn’t any standard for the actual mechanics of how the data is interchanged, but usually organizations adopt the HL7 standard for payloads. Most of our integrations look like “we’ll send you this HL7 payload, then we’ll periodically check this folder for any HL7 payloads to stick into the patient record”. If you want an analogy, think of any vehicle that human lives are dependent on, held together by duct tape. :) I will say there are EMRs like Athena Health which actually build for the developer experience. Integrating with Athena is relatively easy, and you can scale up the integration across customers easily. Epic (the market leader) is much harder and more expensive to do this for, since every distribution usually has some customization.

tasn 6y ago

We are going to start working towards HIPAA soon, and we also going to offer a way to end-to-end encrypt the payload in the very near future. The encryption doesn't help with HIPAA (does it?), but it definitely helps with peace of mind and reducing the attack surface.

bradgessler 6y ago

Very interesting. What’s the best way to learn more about this problem? Are you working for a healthcare tech company integrating with these legacy systems via FTP, or are you working for a provider or insurance company’s IT organization trying to integrate with said legacy systems for in-house software? Is this what it would look like? https://docs.mulesoft.com/ftp-connector/1.5/ https://docs.mulesoft.com/ftp-connector/1.5/ If there’s any links or vendors you could share so I could learn about this I’d greatly appreciate it.

primitivesuave 6y ago
Happy to elaborate more for you. I work on the health tech side, so we’re integrating with legacy systems. I’d say there isn’t any standard for the actual mechanics of how the data is interchanged, but usually organizations adopt the HL7 standard for payloads. Most of our integrations look like “we’ll send you this HL7 payload, then we’ll periodically check this folder for any HL7 payloads to stick into the patient record”. If you want an analogy, think of any vehicle that human lives are dependent on, held together by duct tape. :) I will say there are EMRs like Athena Health which actually build for the developer experience. Integrating with Athena is relatively easy, and you can scale up the integration across customers easily. Epic (the market leader) is much harder and more expensive to do this for, since every distribution usually has some customization.