Our Approach

MDIX has a vision for delivering value in our solutions based on a simple set of technical and business principles.

Our technical vision is to produce solutions that not only solve the interoperability problem but more importantly, seamlessly manage the inevitable and ubiquitous interoperability changes. To achieve the highest quality healthcare interoperability for the entire community, our business vision is that an open and collaborative approach is required. Interoperability cannot be proprietary.


MDIX Business Approach

MDIX’s business principles were formed by its founders in their work with two organizations prior to the company’s formation. One is the Object Management Group (OMG) whose work involves open standards. The second is Open Health Tools, a consortium providing open source software for the healthcare community.

Working in these open organizations demonstrated the value an open community can bring. A team of leading experts in information exchange collaborated through OMG resulting in the open standard Model Driven Message Interoperability, or MDMI. The Open Health Tools organization with their expertise defined content level requirements to address healthcare interoperability. Open source allows others to contribute to solutions while ensuring their contributions are available to the entire community.

Working with these standards organizations has continued since our founding. MDIX is a project member of an OMG team leading the effort for enhancements to MDMI 2.0. We continue to provide MDMI compliant open source software. We participate in and lead other open standards projects in Health Level Seven or HL7, the open industry standard group, ranging from interoperability content standards to functional capabilities for transformation services.



MDIX Technical Approach

MDIX’s technical approach is based on the OMG MDMI standard. The standard was developed to address the business requirement of better managing and implementing change in information exchanges between different organizations. The effort resulted in the MDMI standard composed of two components, the MDMI Transformation Metamodel and a MDMI Semantic Element Exchange Registry (SEER).

The MDMI Transformation Metamodel is used to create a MDMI Transformation Model for a specific format. It is designed so any transformation model can exchange information with any other. To exchange information between different MDMI Transformation Models, shared knowledge is needed. MDMI minimizes the amount of required shared knowledge to singular data elements common in both formats. The meaning of a data element is stable. For example, the name of the data attribute Patient Name may change, but the meaning of Patient Name does not change. This shared, stable, common knowledge is made available in the SEER for anybody to use when in developing MDMI Transformation Models.

MDMI Transformation Models capture all the information to be used as either the source format or to produce a target file such as HL7 v2.9 or FHIR STU3. Being open source, the MDMI Transformation Models are reused by the community. Therefore, when a new map is required, the scope of the knowledge problem is reduced by half. Creation of an MDIX Transformation Model for any format only requires use of the MDMI Map Editor. No knowledge of any other format is required. Once an MDMI Transformation Model has been developed, it will interoperate with any other model. When both transformation models, source and target exist, the exchange solution is reduced to a configuration issue.

Using the model-driven approach, MDIX has provided other beneficial capabilities and components.

  • Tooling to easily populate the metamodel to create a model for a format.
  • Tooling to automatically populate an MDMI Transformation Model from XML documents and UML models.
  • An application for modifying existing transformation models.
  • Reports can be automatically generated for business analysts and other members of the implementation team.
  • Test tooling is available.

For more information about the MDMI Standard, its specification and how it is expressed is available at https://www.omg.org/mdmi/.