What is the it?
The Federated Mirth Connect Channel is a channel that hooks into the standard NwHIN process in order to inject documents from sources that cannot be fronted with a NwHIN Gateway. Typically, this is used with EMRs and other systems that cannot interface with NwHIN but can provide CDA documents or information to produce CDA documents. With this channel, you can simply query those EMRs and ask for documents or data based on the parameters given (parameter details to come). Once the documents are constructed, you need to simply put the documents in the channel's response map and those documents will be added to the NwHIN response to the remote NwHIN Gateway asking for documents.
How is the channel structured?
The channel is simply an HTTP listener channel listening on a configurable port that can route to any number of destinations. The query parameters come in via an HTTP post to this channel, and the documents are returned using the response map.
What are the inbound parameters?
Here's an example of the XML coming in on the source connector:
Of course, this XML does not contain all the parameters possible. Here are the fields in the class that could be populated:
The data coming in basically allows the channel author to filter the documents the same way NwHIN would. The flexibility of the channel architecture allows you to pass these parameters downstream, whether it be a database call to fetch data or to a web service call to fetch documents, and filter out data that does not match the inbound parameters.
What do I put in the response map?
If you are creating documents by building up a Mirth Results Clinical Document Model, then you will already be creating a List<CdaDocument> objects. Otherwise, you will need to take the documents you have, most likely in String form, and turn these into a List<CdaDocument>. These objects, serialized to XML, are the return type that the adapter is expecting to inject the documents into the NwHIN workflow. The following is a code snippet showing how to build the response map:
Now, make sure the source connector is responding with the CCDList variable, and you will be good to go.