Technology Glossary

Each entry gives a short definition, a note on why it matters in practice, and links to the service or guide that covers it in depth. Use the letters to jump, or type to filter.

C

CCDA

Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture — an HL7 XML standard for exchanging clinical documents such as care summaries between healthcare systems and HIEs.

Why it matters: C-CDA documents are still the common currency for transitions of care and HIE document exchange, so most integration projects need to read or produce them.

HIE IntegrationHL7, FHIR & EDI Integration

CI/CD

Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery — automated pipelines that build, test and release software safely and repeatedly.

Why it matters: Small, automated releases are easier to test, review and roll back than big manual ones, and the pipeline itself becomes your change-control evidence.

DevOps & AutomationPlatform Engineering How to Set Up a CI/CD Pipeline That Scales

F

FinOps

A practice combining finance and engineering to give cloud spending accountability, forecasting and continuous cost optimization.

Why it matters: Cloud bills grow quietly. FinOps puts cost next to engineering decisions so teams can see the price of what they build and cut waste without slowing delivery.

Cloud & InfrastructureManaged IT Services Cloud Cost Optimization: A FinOps PlaybookKubernetes Without the Runaway Bill

H

HIE

Health Information Exchange — a network that lets healthcare organisations securely share patient records across different systems and providers.

Why it matters: Connecting to an HIE gives clinicians a fuller patient history from other providers, but it requires identity matching and IHE-profile integration done carefully.

HIE Integration

HL7 / FHIR

Healthcare interoperability standards for exchanging clinical and administrative data between systems.

Why it matters: Most hospitals still run on HL7 v2 messages while new apps expect FHIR APIs. Real interoperability usually means bridging the two.

HL7, FHIR & EDI IntegrationFHIR Interoperability HL7 vs FHIR: Healthcare Integration Guide

I

IaC

Infrastructure as Code — provisioning and managing infrastructure through version-controlled definitions (e.g. Terraform) instead of manual clicks.

Why it matters: Infrastructure defined in code can be reviewed, versioned and rebuilt identically in another region, which is what makes environments reproducible and auditable.

DevOps & AutomationCloud & Infrastructure

IHE

Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise — a set of interoperability profiles (XDS, PIX/PDQ, XCA, ATNA) that standardise how healthcare systems and HIEs exchange documents and identity.

Why it matters: IHE profiles turn broad standards into specific, testable transactions, so two systems that both "support XDS" can actually exchange documents.

HIE IntegrationInterface Engine & Support

ISMS

Information Security Management System — the policies, controls and processes at the heart of ISO 27001.

Why it matters: ISO 27001 certifies the management system, not a single control, so the ISMS (scope, risk method, policies, reviews) is what auditors actually examine.

ISO 27001 ComplianceSecurity & Compliance ISO 27001 Readiness: What Gets You Certified

M

Mirth Connect

A widely used healthcare integration engine that routes, transforms and monitors HL7, FHIR, EDI and CCDA messages between systems. NextGen made it commercial from v4.6; the community-maintained open-source fork is the Open Integration Engine.

Why it matters: An interface engine sits between clinical systems so each one does not need custom point-to-point code; monitoring it well is what keeps lab results and orders flowing.

Mirth Connect ServicesInterface Engine & Support HL7 vs FHIR: Healthcare Integration Guide

O

Observability

The ability to understand a system's internal state from its outputs — metrics, logs and traces.

Why it matters: Monitoring tells you something is wrong; observability helps you work out why, which is what shortens incidents in distributed systems.

SRE & ObservabilityManaged IT Services Kubernetes Without the Runaway Bill

OpenEMR

The leading open-source electronic health record (EHR) and practice-management system — self-hostable, customisable and free of licence lock-in.

Why it matters: Open source means no licence lock-in, but it also means you own hosting, upgrades, security patching and customisation.

OpenEMR Services

R

RAG

Retrieval-Augmented Generation — grounding a large language model in your own data so answers are accurate and citable.

Why it matters: RAG lets an assistant answer from your documents instead of guessing, and lets you show the source for every answer, which is what makes it usable in production.

Generative AI & AgentsAI & Data Engineering Taking RAG From Prototype to Production

S

SLO / SLA

Service Level Objective / Agreement — measurable reliability targets, and the commitments made against them.

Why it matters: An SLO tells engineers how reliable a service needs to be; the error budget it leaves tells them when to ship features and when to fix stability.

SRE & ObservabilityManaged IT Services

SMART on FHIR

A framework that layers OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect security and app-launch onto FHIR, letting apps securely access EHR data with scoped permissions.

Why it matters: It is the standard way to launch a third-party app inside an EHR with the right user and patient context, without sharing passwords.

FHIR Interoperability

U

US Core / USCDI

US Core is the FHIR implementation guide that constrains resources to meet USCDI — the standardised set of health data classes mandated under the 21st Century Cures Act.

Why it matters: If you build certified health IT or patient-access APIs in the US, conforming to US Core is how you show you expose the required USCDI data.

FHIR InteroperabilityHL7, FHIR & EDI Integration

V

VAPT

Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing — finding and validating security weaknesses before attackers do.

Why it matters: Scanners find candidate issues; a penetration tester proves which ones are actually exploitable. Together they give you a prioritised fix list rather than a wall of alerts.

VAPT ServicesSecurity & Compliance

Z

Zero Trust

A security model that trusts nothing by default and verifies every request, regardless of network location.

Why it matters: With remote work and cloud services, there is no safe "inside" network any more. Zero Trust replaces that assumption with identity, device and context checks on every request.

Security & ComplianceCloud & Infrastructure

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