Halifax · remote across Canada
Interfaces clinicians can trust and auditors can read.
Harbour Gate Health is a small practice that designs, maps, and documents hospital system interfaces. We work in HL7 v2, FHIR R4, and Mirth / NextGen Connect — then we leave a paper trail that privacy officers and underwriters do not have to decode.
PHIPA-aware practice
HL7 v2 & FHIR R4
Mirth / NextGen Connect
Underwriting-ready docs
Services
What we take on, and what we refuse to rush.
We are a boutique, not a body shop. The list is short on purpose. If a request is mostly net-new product work, we will say so and point you at a studio that builds software — including, when it fits, Fundy Ops.
-
HL7 v2 interface design
ADT, ORM/ORU, SIU, and DFT work that respects the segments you already send. We map Z-segments with discipline, write the acknowledgement rules down, and sit the first production night with your interface analyst.
-
FHIR R4 mapping
Patient, Encounter, Observation, and ServiceRequest resources mapped to the systems on the floor — not a greenfield graph that ignores your HIS. Profiles stay as thin as the use case allows.
-
Mirth / NextGen Connect
Channel design, filters, transformers, and the operational runbook. We treat the engine as a clinical device: named channels, promotion paths, and someone accountable when a queue backs up at 02:00.
-
Interface scoping
A fixed-fee discovery. You receive a message inventory, a risk register, and a build estimate a CFO can defend. No “we will know once we start” — that sentence does not survive an audit committee.
-
Underwriting-friendly tech docs
Architecture notes, data-flow diagrams, retention statements, and vendor responsibility matrices written for insurers and privacy offices. Engineers still get the field-level appendix; the cover letter is in English.
Approach
The smallest change that is still safe.
-
01
Listen on the ward and at the engine
We sit with the people who already live in the messages — unit clerks, biomedical, the night analyst — before we open a specification. The interface is rarely the only story.
-
02
Inventory what already moves
Every feed, every acknowledgement, every silent drop. The inventory becomes the spine of the scoping note and the first artefact an underwriter sees.
-
03
Design the narrow path
We prefer one well-owned channel to a mesh of cleverness. Mapping decisions are written as decisions, with a name and a date, not as comments in a transformer.
-
04
Prove it off to the side
Non-production channels, synthetic patients, a go/no-go that a clinical lead can understand. We do not rehearse on the census.
-
05
Hand over work a stranger can run
Runbooks, promotion steps, and a short film of the happy path if the team wants it. When we leave, the interface still has an owner.
Contact
Tell us what is already moving.
This form stays in your browser. Do not include patient names, health-card numbers, or message payloads. If you need to share a sample, we will open a secure channel after we reply.
Harbour Gate Health
201 Portland Street
Dartmouth, Nova Scotia B2Y 1J6
hello@harbourgate.health
902 555 0148