InterSystems IRIS Data Platform reduces complexity for Epic customers
Epic is using the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform for data ingestion and analysis in its latest release of its EHR.
Scott Gnau, vice president of data platforms at InterSystems, said the IRIS Data Platform will enable Epic customers to access larger, more varied datasets because it is capable of synchronizing data from different types of databases. The platform also makes it easier to build and deploy applications geared toward ingesting and analyzing large amounts of data.
Epic is InterSystems largest customer and has worked with the database management company for more than 40 years. The InterSystems IRIS Data Platform was launched 24 months ago as a product suite that brings together different components of the legacy technology InterSystems has built over the years for data management, Gnau said.
How it works
The InterSystems IRIS Data Platform functions as data management software.
“You can think of it like it’s a database engine,” Gnau said. “We call it a data platform because it’s a little bit broader.”
The InterSystems IRIS Data Platform isn’t tied to one type of database product, instead capable of ingesting data from multiple types at once, including a relational database and document database. A relational database is an organized means of storing related data, while document databases store all data that falls under a single topic.
“Basically you can give us any kind of data, whether you have a schema or not, we’re able to store it, create asset compliance transactions, make sure we don’t lose your data and optimize your access back to the data for queries,” Gnau said.
Gnau said the IRIS Data Platform comes out of the box ready to work with document, relational, transactional and in-memory databases.
Gnau said the platform reduces data complexity for healthcare applications. If a healthcare organization implements an application that required data from relational, document and in-memory databases at the same time, the app may use three different database engines and would have to manage the synchronization between each of those platforms, according to Gnau.
“We do that automatically, it’s part of the data platform,” he said. “Doing it all at the same time and doing it consistently is a really important part of the differentiation that we provide and our partners like Epic depend on.”