interface engine and related services · organisation thriving on the culture of being a...

Malta Information Technology Agency, Gattard House, National Road, Blata l-Bajda HMR 9010 Malta Telephone (+356) 21234710 Facsimile: (+356) 2134701

Web Site: www.mita.gov.mt

Interface Engine and Related Services

Request for Information

Reference Number: R069/15 Date of Publication: 22 October 2015

Closing Date: 23 November 2015

Public



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Table of Contents

01 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................................................... 3

02 MITA PROFILE ............................................................................................................................................................. 5

03 BACKGROUND INFORMATION .................................................................................................................................. 6

04 CURRENT ENVIRONMENT ......................................................................................................................................... 7

05 OBJECTIVES AND SCOPE OF RFI ............................................................................................................................. 9

OBJECTIVES ............................................................................................................................................................................. 9 SCOPE OF RFI ......................................................................................................................................................................... 9

06 REQUIREMENTS ....................................................................................................................................................... 11

INTERFACE ENGINE SOLUTION ................................................................................................................................................ 11 06.1 Deployment models of the solution .................................................................................................................... 11 06.2 Technical description of the software product .................................................................................................... 11 06.3 Description of functional capabilities of the Integration Engine software including: ........................................... 11 06.4 Security and performance attributes .................................................................................................................. 12 06.5 Implementation, migration and core team support ............................................................................................. 12 06.6 Product support and maintenance ..................................................................................................................... 12 06.7 Project Management and Financial Information ................................................................................................. 13 06.8 Other .................................................................................................................................................................. 13

ANNEX A - SUPPLIER INFORMATION FORM ....................................................................................................................... 14



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01 Introduction

01.1 Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA) intends to conduct a market research on the

availability of an

Interface Engine and Related Services (R069/15)

01.2 This Request for Information (henceforth RFI) is being issued to invite interested parties to

provide MITA on behalf of the Government of Malta and the Ministry responsible for Health in

particular with the required information.

01.3 Interested parties are requested to provide the required information by Monday 23rd

November 2015 at 12:00 (CET). Submission of responses to the RFI are to be made via

email on [email protected] quoting the RFI title and reference number.

01.4 Responses and any related supplementary information are to be submitted electronically and

in the English Language.

01.5 Suppliers are to visit the MITA website (www.mita.gov.mt/rfi) to be aware of the latest

information published on this RFI to assist them in submitting their response.

01.6 MITA may request suppliers to provide it with clarifications or additional information in

connection with their submission.

01.7 The information collected through the submissions will be treated as confidential and shall be

processed in accordance with the Data Protection Act (Chapter 440 of the Laws of Malta).

01.8 No costs incurred by the suppliers in responding to this RFI, including but not limited to the

preparation and submission, shall be reimbursable. All such costs shall be borne by the

supplier.

01.9 Information submitted in response to this RFI will become the property of the Government of

Malta. MITA will not pay for the information solicited or for the use of the information

submitted.

01.10 MITA on behalf of the Government of Malta shall retain possession of all documents received.

All materials provided by the interested parties will be treated as confidential and are non-

returnable.

01.11 This RFI is to be treated solely as exploratory market research for the purpose of gaining

knowledge of Interface Engines for the health domain and related services available in the

market and an estimate of their corresponding costs. This RFI should not be regarded as a

Call for Tenders (CfT) or as an obligation to procure on the part of MITA. No contract

will result from any response to this RFI.

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.mita.gov.mt/rfi



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01.12 MITA and the Government of Malta reserves the right to issue a (CfT) for the same or

similar services in the future.

01.13 Integration and Interface Engines are sometimes used as interchangable terms, furthermore

the funcitionalities of such engines may be included as part of an Enterprise Services Bus

(ESB) through a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The main scope of this RFI is to gain

infomation about possible implementations of a solution within the Health domain which

facilitates the interfacing requirements between Health systems using but not limited to Health

Standards. In this regard, within this RFI, the terms integration and interface are to be

interpreted as terms which facilitate system to system data interoperability.



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02 MITA Profile

The Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA) is the central driver of Government’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) policy, programmes and initiatives in Malta. The role of MITA is to deliver and implement the assigned programmes as set out in the Digital Malta National ICT Strategy 2014 - 2020, and as directed by the Parliamentary Secretary for Competitiveness and Economic Growth from time to time. MITA manages the implementation of IT programmes in Government to enhance public service delivery and provides the infrastructure needed to execute ICT services to Government. MITA is also responsible to propagate further use of ICT in society and the economy and to promote and deliver programmes to enhance ICT education and the use of ICT as a learning tool. MITA officially took over the operations of MITTS Ltd on 1st January 2009. Whilst MITTS Ltd (and its predecessor) was solely devoted in providing a service to Government, MITA’s role is extended to cover projects and services on a national scale. MITA shall therefore continue to excel in providing ICT infrastructure and services, professional project management and consulting services to the Government. The Agency is dedicated in assisting the Government in transforming technological innovations into real business solutions. Its unique approach combines an innovative array of ICT and project management services with focused delivery capabilities using tried and tested methodologies to help fulfil Government’s strategies and projects and maximise the benefits of investment in technology. Building upon the strong legacy of all its predecessors MITA operates within a defined national ICT strategy. Besides the expertise, MITA inherited a mature organisation that makes it comparable to the best practices in the corporate scene. The Agency is a young, fresh, dynamic and knowledge-driven organisation thriving on the culture of being a cutting-edge IT services player. MITA prioritises national ICT targets, and embraces open standards and technologies as a matter of policy. The Agency builds, nurtures and sustains excellent industry relations both locally and internationally. The above is reflected in MITA’s mission statement and reinforces the Agency’s pivotal role in the evolution of Malta into a world class information society and economy. For an effective execution of its raison d’être MITA has three fundamental components which are embraced by all its employees. MITA has a transformation approach towards its programmes and projects – to transform the way they are engineered together with their delivery, their return on investment and the enhancement of all-round value they effectively provide. Innovation is the second component – the aspiration to become the leading innovator within the public sector and one of the prime movers in the innovation circuit in Malta by thinking creatively in respect of its people, technology and operations. MITA’s strive for excellence is its third component which strengthens the agency’s craving for continuous improvement at all levels. Further corporate information may be obtained from the following web portals: Government of Malta http://www.gov.mt Malta Information Technology Agency http://www.mita.gov.mt

http://www.gov.mt/

http://www.mita.gov.mt/



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03 Background Information

The public health care service in Malta, which interacts in various manners with private health care, delivers quality health care in an equitable manner to all Maltese citizens. The World Health Organization (WHO) consistently ranks Malta’s health care service amongst the top nations worldwide. This state of play of public health care is a direct consequence of the forward thinking and vision established for health care in Malta by successive administrations. Health care, and importantly, its ability to be delivered in a high level of quality and in a cost effective manner, forms one of the cardinal social pillars of Malta and has accordingly been safeguarded as such. Thus public health care is provided at no charge to the patient at the point of delivery and pharmaceuticals are also provided free subject to the meeting of criteria established under formal schemes. The political owner for public health care is the Ministry for Energy and Health (MEH). The Minister for Energy and Health is responsible for policy, direction and planning for all levels of public health care including the primary, secondary and tertiary health care sectors. Since 2004 MITA has, in fulfilment of its mandate as information technology agent to the Government of Malta, partnered with the Ministry responsible for health (Health) in the acquisition, implementation and support of clinical and non-clinical information systems within the public health care including Malta’s state hospitals and primary health institutions. In 2007 the Government of Malta contracted the delivery and or upgrade of a suite of Information Systems on behalf of Health. These Information Systems consist of a Patient Administration System (PAS), Laboratory Information System (LIS), Radiology Information System (RIS), Picture Archiving Communication System (PACS), a Cardiology Information system (CVIS), an Order Communications system and an HL7 Interface Engine (currently referred to as Integration Engine [iIE]) and are currently implemented across Government hospitals, primary and tertiary healthcare institutions. The delivery of the Information Systems included the provision of Interface services for the integration of the disparate systems. .



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04 Current Environment

Health currently has contracts in place for the provision and support of the HL7 Interface engine including the HL7 interfaces. The contractor is responsible for 2

nd and 3

rd level of support of the

product and also for the implementation and support of any interfaces required to exchange HL7 messages between health information systems procured by Health. The support of the HL7 Interface Engine is on a 24 x 7 basis. The contracted service level agreement is tabled below:

Software Problem Severity

Problem description Response Time

Restoration Time

Target Resolution

Time

Critical (Priority 1)

Entire Licensed Software module unavailable, the application is completely inoperable impeding clinical service provision; or Hardware is unavailable or inoperable

15 minutes

2 hours 4 hours

High (Priority 2)

Business critical system function or group of functions of’ the Licensed Software or Hardware is unusable, inaccessible or not operating correctly

30 minutes 4 hours

8 hours

Medium (Priority 3)

Non business Critical system function or group of functions or the Licensed Software or Hardware is unusable, inaccessible or not operating correctly

1 day 5 days Agreed periodic maintenance

MITA’s current role with respect to the HL7 Interface Engine (iIE) is 1

st level of support, which

includes:

Service Call Centre for the logging of calls;

Level one troubleshooting of issues related to HL7 message transmission Furthermore the HL7 Interface Engine is hosted on a server platform procured and supported by MITA. Figure 1 below illustrates the high level architecture of iIE which consists of two physical servers (single 3Ghz Xeon CPU with 4Gb of RAM each) implemented across both of Government’s data centres. These servers are SAN attached and configured in a highly available setup through the use of Microsoft Failover Cluster technologies at both the operating and database layers. Furthermore Health has two other separate physical servers that are used for quality assurance purposes mainly to test the various interfaces currently implemented.



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Gov’s DCs

Production Interface Engine

(active/passive)

Microsoft

Failover

Cluster (OS &

SQL)

Test iSoft

Integration Engine

Gov/ Departmental HIS

RISPACSPAS LISCVIS

HL

7 v

2.4

x

ove

r

LL

P/M

LL

P

Figure 1: High level architecture of the Integration Engine

iIE handles/routes circa 200,000 HL7 (ver 2.4x) messages a day across various health information systems (HIS). All HL7 messages are transported using the Low Level Protocol (LLP), sometimes referred to as the Minimal Lower Layer Protocol (MLLP) over TCP/IP. The following diagram depicts a subset of the HIS currently implemented in Health and the respective HL7 messages that are routed through iIE.

Figure 2: Various HIS and respective HL7 messages that are routed through iIE



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05 Objectives and Scope of RFI

Objectives

The efficient and reliable automated transfer of data between the various disparate health information systems, via an interface engine using industry standard protocols including but not limited to HL7, is an essential requisite for business continuity and interoperability within healthcare. MITA also recognises the importance of an internal capacity for the provision of system integration services within Maltese healthcare which would be autonomous yet supported by a recognised supplier of interface software and services. MITA believes that such capacity is critical for the achievement of agility and effectiveness with respect to the integration of the disparate health information systems. The current Integration Engine implemented in 2007 and described in section 04 is planned for replacement. Moreover Government wants to diminish reliance on 3

rd parties for the provision of

systems integration services. Therefore the objectives of this initiative are to:

Replace iIE with a best-of-breed interface engine or solution achieving the requirements that conforms to current technology, industry standards, protocols and best practices and that will serve Government for a minimum of five years;

Procure support and maintenance services for the replacement interface engine from the product vendor;

Set up a core team of integration specialists to be trained in the use of the product with the aim of providing system integration services to the Maltese healthcare sector. Such team will continue to receive the necessary support from the supplier of the interface engine. The solution will provide Government with the flexibility to interface current and future information systems within Health without unnecessary dependencies on external resources and parties.

Scope of RFI

MITA is tapping the market in order to acquire knowledge of best-of-breed interface engines, identify interested vendors operating in the provision of interfacing software and services and that could provide the services as documented in this RFI. This RFI is intended to provide MITA with:

Intelligence pertinent to the health interfacing solution market including available products, technical and business classification of such products as well as pricing for future budgeting and planning purposes;

Knowledge of current technologies, industry standards, protocols, architectures and best practices pertaining to best-of-breed interface software relevant to the integration of current and future health information systems, as well as technology roadmaps for the next 5 years;

Available options for vendor product support and maintenance of the interface engine solution;

Recommended approaches and considerations for the implementation of a replacement interface engine including the migration of existing application interfaces from the iIE whilst maintaining business continuity;



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Awareness of the recommended business and technical skills required by the core team and that need to be developed including any specific training needs in the use of the product, general interfacing skills as well as competencies related to messaging protocols including but not limited to HL7;

Options for the ongoing support of the systems integration team by the product vendor.



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06 Requirements

Interested parties are kindly requested to submit the following information appropriately scaled to meet at a minimum the current setup (as explained in section 4) and objectives (as explained in section 5) for the next 5 years.

Interface Engine Solution

A detailed description (textual and graphical as required) of the Interface Engine Solution including:

06.1 Deployment models of the solution

Indicate and provide details of the available deployment options below (kindly include both options where applicable):

a. Client site implementation across Government’s geo-clustered data centres. i. Solution and infrastructure architecture; ii. Hosting platform requirements; iii. Supported operating systems, application server software, DBMS, etc; iv. Supported server virtualisation technologies; v. Information of how high availability in a Active / Passive and or Active / Active setup

can be achieved; vi. Other relevant information;

b. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) i. Solution and infrastructure architecture ii. Location of host data centres; iii. Support for high availability; iv. Expected minimum length of contract term; v. Typical international bandwidth requirements; vi. Supported secure connectivity protocols; vii. Other relevant information;

06.2 Technical description of the software product

a. Technologies employed across the entire software stack including any third party products or tools;

b. Product and product technology roadmap in relation to recognised trends in systems integration within the Health domain.

c. Possibilities for interfacing third-party systems and hardware. For example using the Interface

Engine to interface laboratory analysers with the laboratory information system, radiology information system and PACS with medical imaging modalities.

d. Scalability attributes of the product including message throughput.

06.3 Description of functional capabilities of the Integration Engine software including:

a. Supported standards and specifications such as: i. IHE

1, HL7

2 ver.2.x, HL7 ver.3, HL7 CDA R2

3, CCD

4, DICOM

5, XML, HL7 FHIR

6,

SOAP and ReST web services;

1 HL7 Clinical Document Architecture Release 2 (http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/product_brief.cfm?product_id=7)

2 Continuity of Care Document (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_of_Care_Document)



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ii. Other standards and specifications (please specify);

b. Message interface design and implementation facilities i. Availability of templates for standard HL7 messages (or other messaging standards

and specifications); ii. Facilities for diagnostic support to integrators such as debug and message trace

facilities;

c. Event handling including event detection, alerting and monitoring;

d. Facilities for message queue monitoring and proactive resolution of message queue issues;

e. Business process design and Workflow Management facilities including i. Process design and implementation facilities

f. Facilities for the extraction of operational data such as message statistics

g. Any other features relevant to the objectives described above.

06.4 Security and performance attributes

a. Security features including message channel security and the security protocols supported by the product

b. Role-based access control and auditing facilities

c. Recommended minimum bandwidth required to support present and future needs

d. Message retention, configuration and recommended backup strategies

06.5 Implementation, migration and core team support

a. Based on the information provided in sections 4, 5 and 6 kindly provide a description of a recommended approach for the implementation and migration from the current Integration Engine to the proposed Interface Engine whilst maintaining business continuity. This may include:

i. Implementation services such as product installation, set-up, configuration and migration of interfaces

ii. Training in the use and administration of the product; iii. Support to administrators and integration specialists throughout migration.

b. Systems Integration training and support

i. Required skills and recommended training for integration specialist personnel related to the product and development of system interfaces.

06.6 Product support and maintenance

a. A description of typical support and maintenance services provided by the vendor also describing how these could meet the objectives outlined above

b. Typical Service Levels (SLAs)

3 HL7 Clinical Document Architecture Release 2 (http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/product_brief.cfm?product_id=7)

4 Continuity of Care Document (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_of_Care_Document)

5 Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (http://medical.nema.org/standard.html)

6 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (http://www.hl7.org/fhir/)



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c. Possibilities for the establishment of ongoing development and product support to integration

specialist personnel.

06.7 Project Management and Financial Information

a. Kindly provide a typical high-level project plan covering the entire implementation cycle including installation, set-up, configuration, training and migration showing expected timescales and highlighting dependencies and other external constraints.

b. Approximate costs to meet the objectives of the next 5 years which amongst others may include:

i. Product software licences ii. Third-party software licences iii. Implementation services (including, where applicable, installation, set-up,

configuration and training) iv. Core team integration team specialists training and support v. Migration services vi. Annual product support services vii. Annual support services to the integration specialist team

06.8 Other

Kindly provide any further information including but not limited to:

a. Product literature, on-line information, customer testimonials and third-party reviews of the proposed product and services.

b. List of noteworthy customer references, reference sites and contact details where available.

MITA reiterates that this RFI is for market research only and the prices being requested are for market research only. MITA may request interested parties to give a presentation of their product and service offering.



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Annex A - Supplier Information Form

Interested parties are requested to complete this Supplier Information Form to provide MITA with information on their organisation, and include it with their submission.

Company Information

1. Name of Company

2. Address

3. Date company was founded

4. Company Registration Number

5. Telephone Number(s):

6. Fax Number(s):

7. Website address:

8. Contact Person for this RFI:

Contact name: Position: e-mail: Address: Telephone number: Mobile number: Fax number:

9. Company Profile

10. Main business activities

interface engine and related services · organisation thriving on the culture of being a...

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