In this edition of Customer Corner, we’re delighted to feature King’s Daughters Medical Center who made the strategic decision to implement a Clinical Data Repository as the long-term home for its legacy MEDITECH EHR data spanning more than 20 years.

The latest HealthStore release, HS24R3, was shipped in December and is now generally available for customers.

Based on customer feedback and market intelligence, several, notable, new features have been developed for this release, building on HealthStore’s capabilities as a leading Clinical Data Repository solution.

HealthStore HS24R3 Highlights

• Visit panel upgraded to enhance user interface

This new enhancement to the HealthStore user interface allows users to quickly find a patient’s most recent set of events and easily sort, search and filter by visit, i.e., by previous visit dates or visit IDs.

• Support for large image files (DICOMweb)

This new feature overcomes the known issues with DICOM (DIMSE) services that struggled to work with large imaging files. Now, HealthStore can retrieve very large studies and display them in a timely fashion to our diagnostic-grade, zero-footprint viewer, offering efficient support to modalities, such as 3D tomography, that rely on larger files.

• Extending PDF download functionality

HealthStore continues to evolve its PDF download functionality to enable those users, with the requisite permissions, to efficiently facilitate tasks – from subject access requests to the transfer of patient information to external healthcare settings. With FHIR now at the heart of HealthStore, users can pull together a wide variety of data and data types to meet their specific needs.

Easier HealthStore Installation & Upgrades

One of the areas of focus for the HealthStore Product Team has been ‘how can we streamline and speed up the process of deploying HealthStore and its upgrades for customers?’. Over the course of the last year, the HealthStore team has been addressing this issue and we’re delighted to share the result….

As part of our new Services methodology, we now install HealthStore using Octopus Deploy – a best-in-class automated deployment tool. And this also applies to customers wishing to upgrade to the latest version of HealthStore. With Octopus Deploy, we utilize automation to ensure HealthStore implementations are correctly configured, managed and deployed, delivering:

• Lower risk
• Less downtime
• Faster project/upgrade delivery.

2025 HealthStore Release Schedule (For Your Calendars)

HealthStore releases are managed through BridgeHead’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) processes. As a result, we are able to schedule the releases a year in advance (albeit they are subject to change). The HealthStore release schedule for 2025 is as follows:

• HealthStore release HS25R1 – end of March 2025
• HealthStore release HS25R2 – end of July 2025
• HealthStore release HS25R3 – end of November 2025.

BridgeHead’s RAPid™ Data Protection solution has evolved significantly this year, with enhancements and new features introduced across three releases: 24A, 24A SP1, and 24A SP2. If you haven’t upgraded your RAPid platform in 2024, the SP2 upgrade is the best way to take advantage of all the recent improvements. Below are a number of product improvements issued across the last three releases.  

Administration Tools

The Admin Console is a web-based admin portal that has advanced substantially in 2024 providing a modern UI for all your day-to-day admin tasks without needing to directly log on to a control node. You can quickly see the status of jobs, monthly backup volumes as well as managing objects, queues and jobs. Improvements introduced this year include:

• Object control – full control to modify all fields or delete / undelete / purge jobs
• Queue management – full control to allow queue edit / start / stop / delete & a new ‘Pause Queue’ option
• Job management – edit / delete from queues
• UX improvements to make it easier to find jobs based on status
• GCP VM restores using restore utilities
• Save or reuse filters (for viewing objects, jobs).

Backup & Filestore Functionality

For Cloud workloads, it’s now possible to automatically create objects using a master job, which greatly reduces the overhead of manually creating an object for each new VM. And another useful operational improvement is an automated check that helps flag if a sub job has failed – which is important to know since without all sub jobs running successfully you might have an incomplete backup.

• Automation option to configure AWS / GCP master sub jobs
• MEDITECH / Cloud backups – confirmation of sub job success status (Finale Job)
• Refreshed Service Node for Linux with ACL support
• Dell Powerflex Storage Arrays now supported for MEDITECH ISB/IDR backups.

Security & Integrity

All vendors now have rolling updates for dependent software components to address security and vulnerability issues – this is a continuous area of focus for the RAPid team. So it’s important to update your RAPid software on a regular basis so that your environment can be as well protected as possible. We’re also pleased to say that with the release of Windows 2025 in November, we are able to support this OS with 24A SP2 (also released in November).

• Replaced Tomcat web services with latest .NET8 components
• Latest Corretto Java dependency security updates
• OpenSSL dependency updated to latest
• Various fixes from routine penetration & vulnerability scans
• Windows 2025 support from 24A SP2.

Performance & Fixes

This is another areas of constant evolution as a result of feedback from customers and our support team. There’s been a big focus on FileStore this year with improvements across the board. As a result, we highly recommended upgrading to the latest version of RAPid – version 24A SP2.

• Over 30 fixes & performance improvements for FileStore
• Greatly improved performance for EDR2NDR migration utility.

Microsoft 2012 Era Product Support

Microsoft have a clear timetable for when support ends for each of their products. Support for Microsoft’s 2012 set of products is coming to end (as highlighted in our documentation). These products have been in extended support for the last 3 years, which means you now have to pay to get updates. But this will cease next year and these products will be formally sunsetted. So, if you’re running these products in your environment, now is the time to think about upgrading.

• Note that in July 2025 Microsoft will completely stop supporting SQL 2012
• Also in October 2026 Microsoft support will also cease for Windows Server 2012
• Please refer to https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/extended-security-updates
• RAPid will also deprecate support for these versions in 2025.

2025 RAPid Data Protection Release Schedule (For Your Calendars)

RAPid releases are managed through BridgeHead’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) processes and are closely aligned to the releases of our HealthStore Clinical Data Repository. As a result, we are able to schedule the releases a year in advance (albeit they are subject to change). The RAPid release schedule for 2025 is as follows:

• RAPid release 25A – end of March 2025
• RAPid release 25A SP1 – end of July 2025
• RAPid release 25A SP2 – end of November 2025.

It’s never been more evident than in the recent, high profile cyberattacks targeting both healthcare providers and the vendors that support them. Clearly, security is a big area that extends beyond cyber events. But that’s why it’s such a huge area of focus for the healthcare sector large.

At BridgeHead Software, we take our responsibilities very seriously and prioritize security in the development of our solutions to protect sensitive patient data and ensure compliance. Our approach includes secure coding, nightly automated scans, manual code reviews, and continuous dependency monitoring via NIST’s Vulnerability Database.

Rigorous automated and manual testing is built into our development, complemented by both internal and third-party penetration testing to identify potential threats. By embedding security throughout our software lifecycle, we help our customers to safeguard patient privacy and maintain system integrity against evolving cyber risks.