CONNECT Community Portal: Federal Health Architectu​re Releases CONNECT 4.0

CONNECT Community Portal

Federal Health Architecture Releases CONNECT 4.0 The Federal Health Architecture (FHA) reached a milestone in its health information exchange efforts Monday, February 11, with the release of CONNECT 4.0. CONNECT, an open source platform for enabling secure health information exchange worldwide, was first released in 2008. As a result of the collaboration effort amongst FHA federal partners –including the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services – CONNECT offers a robust, scalable platform for the exchange of health data between organizations, vendors and providers to share medical information and improve patient care. CONNECT 4.0, the latest release of CONNECT, supports current federal IT standards and Meaningful Use Stage 2 core objectives related to the secure electronic exchange of information through CONNECT’s support of Direct project specifications and NwHIN transports (i.e., electronically sending and receiving patient data, registering immunization information, public health reporting and patient access to data). It also offers users more flexibility for users through its modular platform – which allows users to pick and choose which components they want to use in their IT environment. Additional features in CONNECT 4.0 allow users to: Receive higher message volumes as CONNECT 4.0 can support secure health information flows of 1600+ messages per minute For the first time, exchange large files – up to 1 GB. Run CONNECT on additional application servers such as Glassfish, IBM WebSphere and Oracle WebLogic to meet unique IT environment needs. Get more comprehensive event and metric data with improved logging capabilities. Since CONNECT is often used as a gateway in concert with other systems like electronic medical records (EMR), improved logging allows adopters to integrate CONNECT into whole-system monitoring. Determine the state of a transaction across messages to better track and analyze the operations of CONNECT and trading partner gateways. Minimize deployment load by supporting a lightweight gateway which allows for a smaller server footprint and use of system resources. FHA will host several activities in February to help the healthcare and health information exchange community learn about the benefits of CONNECT 4.0. To stay up-to-date on these activities, participate and find out more about CONNECT, visit the CONNECT website and sign up to receive updates at http://www.connectopensource.org/.