Docker for healthcare interoperability

Can Docker, Mirthconnect and HL7 be the answer to healthcare interoperability?

On the last few day I have been messing around with Docker, NextGen® and came up with a little setup for the first experiments!! I will focus on the docker setup for now, and later I will present more detailed info on NextGen channels created!

The goal was to build a framework with 2 nextgen agents, each one based on a mySQL database. The final step establish communication between them by hl7.

I have an Ubuntu Server 16.04LTS freshly installed on my Virtual Box, and I started my quest! I followed some tutorials, but you can have all the best information from docker docs.

Update and upgrade the system
```
 $ sudo apt upgrade
 $ sudo apt update
```
Install docker
```
 $ sudo apt install docker
```
After docker was installed I had two options: build my own docker or use something already available. I went for the easiest one… I had no time to waste! I used fabrom/mirth-connect-docker from github!
```
 $ git clone https://github.com/fabrom/mirth-connect-docker.git
```

Since I had no past experience with docker, I had some issues trying to understand how ports and dns works inside the infrastructure! But after some carefull online search I was able to edit docker-compose.yml according to my needs!
First of all added the portainer container for logs and management.

         portainer:
             image: portainer/portainer
             command: -H unix:///var/run/docker.sock
             restart: always
             ports:
             - 9000:9000
             volumes:
             - "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock"
             - "./data/portainer_data:/data"

The second step was to build 2 containers of each: Two for the mySQL databases and two for the NextGen software. My final docker-compose.yml is here:

     version: '2'
         services:
         portainer:
             image: portainer/portainer
             command: -H unix:///var/run/docker.sock
             restart: always
             ports:
             - 9000:9000
             volumes:
             - "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock"
             - "./data/portainer_data:/data"

         mirthdb1:
             container_name: mirthdb1
             image: mysql:5.6
             command: mysqld --innodb-buffer-pool-size=20M
             volumes:
             - "./data/db1:/var/lib/mysql:rw"
             environment:
             - "MYSQL_DATABASE=mirthdb"
             - "MYSQL_USER=mirth"
             - "MYSQL_PASSWORD=password"
             - "MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password"
             ports:
             - "3311:3306"

         mirthdb2:
             container_name: mirthdb2
             image: mysql:5.6
             command: mysqld --innodb-buffer-pool-size=20M
             volumes:
             - "./data/db2:/var/lib/mysql:rw"
             environment:
             - "MYSQL_DATABASE=mirthdb2"
             - "MYSQL_USER=mirth"
             - "MYSQL_PASSWORD=password"
             - "MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password"
             ports:
             - "3312:3306"

         mirthconnect1:
             build: mirth-connect
             image: fabrom/mirth-connect
             container_name: mirthconnect1
             volumes:
             - "./mirth-connect/mirth.properties:/opt/mirth-connect/conf/mirth.properties:rw"
             - "./data/spool_mirth/:/var/spool/mirth/:rw"
             ports:
             - "9091:8080"
             - "9441:8443"
             links:
             - mirthdb1
             depends_on:
             - mirthdb1

         mirthconnect2:
             build: mirth-connect
             image: fabrom/mirth-connect
             container_name: mirthconnect2
             volumes:
             - "./mirth-connect/mirth2.properties:/opt/mirth-connect/conf/mirth.properties:rw"
             - "./data/spool_mirth2/:/var/spool/mirth/:rw"
             ports:
             - "9092:8081"
             - "9442:8444"
             - "6661:6661"
             links:
             - mirthdb2
             - mirthconnect1
             depends_on:
             - mirthdb2
             - mirthconnect1

As one can see, there i the need to link the databases to the NextGen containers and port management should be taken in careful consideration.

NextGen1 (mirthconnect1) has two ports, both http(9091) and https(9441), depends and links on Mysql1(mirthdb1) with the port (3111)

NextGen1 (mirthconnect2) has three ports, both http(9092) and https(9442) as mirthconnect1, but also 6661 to be the reciever end of hl7 messages, depends and links on Mysql2(mirthdb2) with the port (3112) and NextGen1(mirthconnect1)

As stated by the volumes in NextGen1 and 2, there is the need to correctly define mirth.properties file for each one. Both of those files canbe found in my github repository.

The next step is to build the docker image (which can take up some time!):
```
 $ docker-compose build --force-rm --no-cache --pull --parallel
```
Start the NextGen-docker stack:
```
 $ docker-compose up -d
```
Stop the NextGen-docker stack:
```
 $ docker-compose down
```

Next up I will bring the channels created! stay tunned!