Mirth to BridgeLink migration – without clinical disruption. HCINT designs coexistence, phased cutover, and observability so your HL7/FHIR traffic stays reliable during and after the transition.
Why this matters now: migration without risking patient care
Many provider organizations and health IT vendors are planning a Mirth to BridgeLink migration to meet security, operability, and roadmap requirements. What’s at stake is bigger than an engine swap: you need continuity for ADT, orders, results, and scheduling, plus clear governance, predictable cost, and auditability. A poorly sequenced move can cause duplicate messages, missing results, or silent latency – the kinds of failures that surface during on-call hours and affect care and revenue. The way to avoid that is a migration pattern that emphasizes coexistence first, then incremental cutover, with roll-back and observability baked in from day one.
Mirth to BridgeLink migration: what you can enable today
- Coexistence for critical feeds – Run ADT/ORM/ORU/SIU on Mirth and BridgeLink in parallel with controlled traffic splitting and ACK comparison.
- v2 ↔ FHIR translation – Move selected routes to FHIR R4 (Patient, Encounter, Observation, Appointment) while keeping HL7 v2 for partners that require it.
- Result normalization – Centralize OBX normalization and code crosswalks (e.g., LOINC ↔ local) in BridgeLink while legacy channels continue to deliver payloads.
- RCM connectors – Introduce prior-auth and denials data flows through new BridgeLink APIs without refactoring existing Mirth exports on day one.
- Imaging workflows – Orchestrate AI for PACS/VNA via BridgeLink, while Mirth continues handling EHR notifications until you’re ready to cut over.
- Unified observability – One dashboard for throughput, latency, AE/AR rates, and DLQ age across both engines, so operations sees a single pane of glass.
Safety, compliance, and observability – HIPAA-aligned from the start
Security and compliance should improve – not regress – during a migration. HCINT implements role-based access control (RBAC) with least privilege, network isolation (on-prem or private VPC), encryption in transit, and managed secrets. For governance, we record the message lifecycle and mapping versions without retaining PHI longer than policy allows, including zero-retention options when required.
- Governance and auditability – Versioned schemas and crosswalks, change tickets tied to releases, and immutable logs spanning received → validated → transformed → delivered → ACKed.
- Observability that matters – Health checks, per-route SLOs, ACK latency, AE/AR rates, de-duplication ratio, DLQ size and age, and cost telemetry by route.
- Security controls – VPC isolation, VPN or private link, TLS, encrypted secrets, and just-in-time credentials for support workflows.
- Operations guardrails – Canary deploys with rollback thresholds, idempotent reprocessing tools, and controlled replay with linked audit events.
Integration patterns: from coexistence to cutover
- Traffic splitting – Start with 5–10% of traffic (by facility, provider group, or feed) on BridgeLink. Compare ACK profiles and error modes before expanding coverage.
- Idempotency by design – Use MSH-10 as the idempotency key (optionally with MSH-9 and MSH-7). Store a digest to collapse replays and guarantee exactly-once effects.
- Durable queues and bounded retries – Exponential backoff with maximum attempts and a dead-letter queue (DLQ) for non-retriable errors. Operators work the DLQ via a guided console.
- Schema-first contracts – Define schema contracts for new events/APIs; validate messages at the edge; ship test suites for partners.
- Versioned crosswalks – Centralize mappings (LOINC, local test codes, visit types) with change history so transformations are explainable under audit.
- Canary and rollback – Pre-agree guardrails (e.g., AE rate or ACK latency thresholds). On breach, auto-rollback traffic to the stable path in minutes.
- Coordinated decommissioning – Only retire Mirth routes after BridgeLink shows stable SLOs for an agreed observation period and stakeholders sign off.
Mini-case: phased migration with quiet on-call
Setting – A regional hospital network with a core EHR and an external reference lab was concerned about duplicates and night-shift escalations. Leadership approved a Mirth to BridgeLink migration provided there was no impact on turnaround times.
Approach – HCINT implemented coexistence: ADT moved first with canary cohorts; results (ORU/OBX) followed using normalized mappings and field-level validation. Idempotency with MSH-10 eliminated replay side effects. Observability panels showed ACK latency, AE/AR, DLQ age, and per-route cost. After two steady weeks, traffic was expanded; legacy routes were decommissioned only after sign-off.
Outcomes – Night-time escalations dropped; reconciliation worklists stabilized; and leadership gained visibility into route health and cost drivers. No EHR changes were required for the initial phases.
Architecture options – on-prem, private VPC, or hybrid
- On-premises – For strict residency, deploy in your data center, segment interfaces by VLAN, and integrate with your IdP for RBAC and SSO.
- Private VPC – Deploy in your cloud account with private connectivity to on-prem systems. Use zero-retention and redaction to minimize PHI exposure.
- Hybrid coexistence – Keep select legacy routes on Mirth while new or high-volume streams run on BridgeLink. Apply one set of policies and dashboards across both.
- Zero-retention mode – Persist message digests and routing metadata only; process PHI in memory with encryption in transit.
Delivery approach – Discovery → Pilot → Scale → Govern
- Discovery – Inventory routes, message types, traffic volumes, mappings, ACK behavior, and failure modes. Confirm security posture and retention policies.
- Pilot – Choose 1–2 routes (often ADT then ORU). Define SLOs, error budgets, and rollback triggers. Stand up dashboards and alerting.
- Scale – Expand traffic by cohort, harden crosswalks, automate schema validation, and align incident workflows with your NOC/clinical engineering.
- Govern – Establish change management, versioning, quarterly DR exercises, and periodic reviews of cost and performance.
Value by organization type
- Hospitals – Stabilize ADT/orders/results, reduce duplicate charting, and keep after-hours calm while modernizing the integration layer.
- Independent & regional labs – Normalize results for many EHRs, improve outreach reliability, and simplify add-on testing flows.
- Clinics – Make referrals and scheduling (SIU/SCH ↔ FHIR Appointment) predictable without new inbox noise.
- Health IT vendors – Ship idempotent APIs, clear contracts, and adapter kits so customer integrations scale with less support burden.
What you get with HCINT
- Coexistence blueprint – Traffic splitting, canary cohorts, and rollback thresholds tailored to each feed.
- Production-grade pipelines – Durable queues, retry/backoff policies, and safe replay tools with operator playbooks.
- Normalization and mapping – OBX harmonization and code crosswalks with version history for audit and explainability.
- Security & governance – RBAC, audit logs, zero-retention options, and change-controlled releases.
- Unified observability – One view of health across Mirth and BridgeLink with per-route SLOs and cost telemetry.
- Vendor-neutral delivery – We support your current engine and introduce BridgeLink where it fits – no vendor bashing or lock-in.
Readiness checklist for CIO/CMIO/IT
- Scope – Which routes move first, and what does success look like for each phase?
- Message identity – Is MSH-10 reliably unique? Do you need a composite key per sender?
- Retry policy – Max attempts, backoff profile, DLQ triage, and escalation path.
- ACK semantics – Where do you require application acceptance (AA) vs. transport success? How do you parse and react to AE/AR?
- Normalization – Where will schema validation and OBX normalization happen? What’s the exception policy?
- Observability – Which metrics are SLOs, and what triggers rollback?
- Compliance – Retention policy, zero-retention requirements, and RBAC across teams and vendors.
Call to action – explore services and book a consult
Planning a Mirth to BridgeLink migration and want a low-risk, observable path? We’ll map your routes, design coexistence, and sequence cutovers without disrupting care.
Explore our services catalog, contact our team, or Book a 20-minute free consult. For interface modernization details, see our Mirth to BridgeLink services overview.
