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FAQ
| What is Mirth Connect? |
| Mirth Connect is an open source standards-based healthcare integration engine. Mirth Connect facilitates the routing, filtering, and transformation of messages between health information systems over a variety of protocols.
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| I’ve heard of Mirth, is Mirth Connect the same thing? |
| Mirth 1.0 was released in 2006 by WebReach, Inc. Based on the rapid growth of the commercial open source project, the company was renamed and relaunched as Mirth Corporation in 2009. To avoid confusion with the company name and the family of Mirth products, like Mirth Results and Mirth Match, Mirth was renamed to Mirth Connect.
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| Who develops Mirth Connect? |
| Mirth Connect is an open source project sponsored by Mirth Corporation, who is also the primary developer. However, there is a large community of users that regularly contribute to the project through bug reports, source code patches, feature requests, and online support.
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| How much does a license for Mirth Connect cost? |
| Absolutely nothing! Mirth Connect can be downloaded for free from the Mirth download page.
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| What is the license for Mirth Connect? |
| Mirth Connect is released under the Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved MPL 1.1. For more information, please visit Mozilla Public License 1.1.
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| How can Mirth Connect be free and open source? |
| Mirth Corporation is the primary developer of Mirth Connect and offers commercial support, services, training, and appliances for the Mirth Connect product. Mirth Corporation also offers a large suite of other HIT products, like Mirth Results and Mirth Match. Mirth Connect has thousands of users that contribute to the project in many different ways, helping to keep Mirth Connect one of the leading integration engines.
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| Is there a difference between the free and open source Mirth Connect download and the supported version of Mirth Connect? |
| No. These are the same versions of Mirth Connect. However, signing up for support gains you access to additional plug-ins and connectors that are not available in the open source release. Urgent bug fixes are also available to support customers without having to wait for the next release.
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| How does Mirth Connect compare to commercial integration engines? |
| We consider Mirth Connect to be a commercial open source product. While Mirth Connect is free and open source, Mirth Corporation provides support, training, and consulting services similar to traditional commercial vendors. Based on customer feedback, Mirth Connect is feature comparable to commercial integration engines and usually fares better in head-to-head comparisons. Because Mirth Connect is open source and community driven, we pride ourselves in our agile development process and frequent release cycle. This combination of open source development and commercial services has caused Mirth Connect to become one of the leading integration engines available today.
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| How many production installations are there of Mirth Connect? |
| Mirth Corporation supports hundreds of production installations of Mirth Connect; however, because Mirth Connect is free and open source, we do not know exactly how many production installations there are. There have been over 100,000 downloads of Mirth Connect and the active online community has over 13,000 members, so we estimate that there are thousands Mirth Connect installations currently in production worldwide.
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| What’s next for Mirth Connect? |
| Mirth Connect 2.0 introduced significant features over Mirth Connect 1.x, including hot-deploy and new connectors. Mirth Connect is continuously evolving and upcoming versions of Mirth Connect will include numerous enhancements and new features. For a more detailed description of these updates, please see the Mirth Connect Roadmap.
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| How fast is Mirth Connect? Do you have any performance numbers? |
| Performance varies greatly depending on your hardware setup and your channel configuration. Benchmarks are available for the hardware appliances that Mirth Corporation offers.
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| Is Mirth Connect difficult to install and configure? |
| No. There are multiple ways to install Mirth Connect. The easiest by far is the cross-platform GUI installer that guides you through the installation process. If you prefer a more hands-on installation, we also offer a zip/tar.gz distribution. We have heard from users that they can get Mirth Connect installed and processing messages in a matter of minutes, not days.
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| Do I need a Mirth Appliance to run Mirth Connect? |
| No. However, running Mirth Connect on the appliance platform provides numerous benefits such as easy updates, added security and reliability through clustering, and a platform that is capable of hosting the entire Mirth family of products, including Mirth Results and Mirth Match. An extensive list of appliances features can be found on the Mirth Appliance page.
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| Where is the documentation for Mirth Connect? |
| Since Mirth Connect is continuously being developed, it is difficult to maintain a comprehensive set of online documentation that is up to date. However, there are numerous resources to help you get started, such as the community-driven wiki and forums. Even without a Mirth support package, you have access to a wealth of information through the active user community which can answer most of your questions.
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| I’m a member of the Mirth community, how can I get more help? |
| Mirth provides numerous support options if you have a specific problem, or would like support for running Mirth Connect in a production setting. By signing up for support, you will have access to online training videos and monthly Q&As with the Mirth Connect developers.
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| How can I become an expert at using Mirth Connect? |
| Mirth Corporation provides extensive Mirth Connect training and a certification program.
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| What are the system requirements for Mirth Connect? |
| Mirth Connect can be run on any system that supports Java. Mirth Connect currently requires the Sun/Oracle JRE 6 or newer.
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| Which databases does Mirth Connect support for its data store? |
| Mirth Connect currently supports: Apache Derby (default), PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. Note that this does not represent the only databases that can be connected to using the Database Reader and Writer connectors. The Database Reader and Database Writer support any type of database as long as the proper client libraries are added to the custom folder of the Mirth Connect install directory.
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| What is the difference between Mirth Connect and an enterprise service bus? |
| While Mirth Connect does provide some of the same capabilities and shares concepts with an enterprise service bus (ESB), it is not one in the traditional sense.
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| Does Mirth Connect use the Mule ESB? |
| Mule is one of the many open source libraries embedded within Mirth Connect. Early versions of Mirth Connect leveraged a modified version of the Mule 1.2 ESB. In recent versions, the extent to which Mirth Connect relies on the Mule library has been greatly reduced, and most of the remaining Mule code has been heavily modified to fix bugs and add features specific to Mirth Connect. It is not possible to make use of the underlying ESB, such as to deploy services or add connectors. It is currently on the Mirth Connect 3.0 road map to remove Mule entirely.
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| Does Mirth Connect need an application server to run? |
| No. Mirth Connect runs as a standalone executable or service in its own JVM.
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| Can Mirth Connect send to ____ or transform from _____ to _____? |
| We get this question often in many different forms, and the answer is generally a resounding yes! Mirth Connect is extremely flexible. Even if a message standard or protocol isn’t natively supported by Mirth Connect, advanced Java and JavaScript capabilities provide enough flexibility to allow almost any type of data to be transformed and transferred.
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| What message standards are supported by Mirth Connect? |
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HL7 v2.x
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HL7 v3
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XML
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X12
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EDI
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DICOM
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NCPDP
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Delmited Text
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| What transfer protocols are supported by Mirth Connect? |
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MLLP
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TCP/IP
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HTTP
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Files
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Database
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S/FTP
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Email
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JMS
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Web Services
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PDF/RTF Documents
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Custom Java and JavaScript
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