Core concepts

A handful of concepts show up throughout the platform. Understanding how they relate makes everything else easier.

The building blocks

Organization — your healthcare entity on the platform. Most things you create belong to your organization.
User — an individual account that signs in. Users belong to an organization and have a role that determines what they can do.
Server — an integration server (an Open Integration Engine / Mirth instance) that you operate. Servers run channels and are the endpoints of data flows.
Channel — a message route on a server. In the Contact System, a published channel is one you’ve exposed so partners can send to it or receive from it.
Peering request — an invitation you send to another organization to establish a working relationship.
Agreement — the active relationship created when a peering request is accepted. An agreement is what makes it possible to share channels and provision connections.
Grant — permission you give a specific peer to access a specific channel. Grants are scoped and revocable.
Connection — a secure tunnel between two servers. A connection carries either channel data (P2P) or remote admin access (Admin).
Gateway — the technology that powers connections: encrypted peer-to-peer tunnels that traverse firewalls without inbound network changes.

How they fit together

The typical flow goes in one direction:

You register a server.
You find a partner in the Directory and send a peering request.
They accept, creating an agreement.
You grant the partner access to one of your published channels.
A connection is provisioned over the gateway, and data starts flowing.

A note on direction

Channels have a direction. A listener receives data from peers; a sender delivers data to a peer. A single agreement can carry multiple grants and connections in either direction. See Channels & published endpoints for details.

Tiers

What you can do — how many servers, peers, and channels you can have — depends on your subscription tier. See Subscription tiers.