Orion Systems International, a leading provider of application integration tools, today announced the launch of the Rhapsody HIPAA Validation service, a free online service that allows the healthcare industry to validate their electronic messages for HIPAA compliance (to 5 types). Healthcare IT staff can access the Rhapsody HIPAA validation site, register and upload their messages. The Rhapsody engine will instantly check and validate whether the message is HIPAA compliant and report back to IT staff.

The Rhapsody HIPAA validation site can be visited at www.orionhealth.com/HIPAAvalidation.

In conjunction with the launch of this free service, Orion also announced the release of version 1.2 of the Rhapsody™ Integration Engine.

Lower costs, faster Integration

The Rhapsody Integration Engine is the only true out-of-the-box enterprise application integration tool based on open standards, combining rapid implementation with lowered overall cost.

"We're hearing a lot of feedback from people in the industry about the high cost of integration engines and the lack of good customer support," said Ian McCrae, CEO of Orion Systems International. "Rhapsody sets out to challenge this situation by providing an integration engine that is not only more cost-effective, but comes with tools that are easier to use and fully backed up by Orion's customer support team."

Rhapsody provides unparalleled ease of integration and ease of use, allowing companies to coordinate and streamline exchange of data between applications and with external business partners - delivering the right information to the right place at the right time.

Rhapsody significantly reduces an organization's ongoing maintenance and administration challenges and helps customers avoid complicated management and ongoing support from outside consultants. Customers don't need to hire specialists in archaic code to maintain the system.

Rhapsody's easy to use interface, self-paced tutorials and global support allow in-house staff to effectively manage the integration engine themselves. Platform and database independence allows customers to use existing staff, hardware and knowledge, rather than need to undertand totally new systems or rely on outside consultants for support.

Rhapsody has impressed IT specialists with its superior speed and ease of use.

"It would take 2-3 days to build a new HL7 interface with our old product, we could create the same interface in a single morning with Rhapsody," said Sudesh Patel, Development Manager, System C Software. "Rhapsody has given us the confidence to handle any message type and not worry about complications. It allows us to concentrate on the development work that we do best, while letting Rhapsody deal effectively with the messaging components of our solutions."

New Features, with a Focus on Healthcare
Rhapsody 1.2 includes important new features that enhance ease-of-use for IT staff, accelerate messaging speeds and improve the ability of organizations to control their IT infrastructure.

• Direct XSLT Transforms to EDI Messages: Rhapsody is the only engine product that can perform XSLT transforms to EDI messages directly, without having to convert the message to XML format first. This can significantly reduce mapping and transmission times for messaging.
• Automated audit trail: Rhapsody automatically archives all messages that pass through the server for future audit and review. The audit log provides an organization with detailed information about who is accessing the system and what is happening to messages, and assists compliance to data security standards.
• Message Grouping: Rhapsody can collect related messages together and then process all of the messages at once. Messages can be grouped together in a number of different ways-for instance, based on time, size, or where they come from. Rhapsody enables users to add their own custom collectors for grouping their messages together.
• More Platform Support: Rhapsody™ Engine is written in Java™ and can run on any platform that supports Sun's Java 2 runtime environment. Rhapsody™ 1.2 has now been tested and has automated installation wizards on Windows NT and 2000 Server, Solaris SPARC, Solaris Intel x86, Linux Intel x86 (Red Hat 7.1, 7.2, 7.3; Mandrake 8.2), HPUX 11.00+, AIX 4.3.3+.
• Built-in Version Control: Rhapsody includes built-in version control, for when Rhapsody is used in a multiple user/developer environment. Rhapsody's version control prevents more than one user making changes to a message definition, which could cause conflicts or changes to be lost.
• Rhapsody comes with over 40 filters and communications points pre-loaded and ready for use, including "out of the box" filters for healthcare and HIPAA.

Rhapsody addresses the specific needs of the healthcare industry with extensive features that manage the transaction standards required under the HIPAA regulations which come into full effect in October 2003. Rhapsody's HIPAA features are included with the product purchase price, unlike other similar products, which require costly HIPAA add-ons to be purchased.

Rhapsody includes pre-defined libraries that contain all standard transactional sets for HIPAA as well as all the definitions for National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP), UB92, NSF and HL7 message standards. Rhapsody can translate older standards such as UB92, HCFA 1500,NFS and HL7 to the new HIPAA formats, or vice-versa.

Rhapsody 1.2 also comes with a number of filters specifically for the processing HIPAA and X12 messages including filters for:

• Validating and generating TA1 acknowledgements (997)
• Splitting interchange messages by functional group for routing to the appropriate systems
• Splitting interchange messages into single transactions for processing
• De-identifying names, addresses, reference identification from HIPAA messages for testing and debugging

These Rhapsody HIPAA features are designed to be implemented by users "out of the box" : in most cases, no custom development is required.