Gazelle general information

Mission Statement.

Gazelle is a suite of tools developed by IHE Europe and IHE Catalyst in partnership with KEREVAL. Gazelle tools allow testing the interoperability of systems as well as the compliance with standards of the messages and documents produced by those systems. First developed to support the development of product in the medical fields, Gazelle is now being use beyond its initial scope (Private insurance in France, Once Only Technical System at EU, and so on). Gazelle also offers a Test Management Solution to support the organisation of Interoperability testing events (on-site, online, hybrid) such as IHE Connectathons or Projectathons.

Management

The IHE Testing & Tools committee supervises and coordinates the testing activities conducted by National and Regional Deployment Committees and the development of testing software and other tools used in the testing process.

The Gazelle project is using a set of project management tools. The tools and the link to the tools used by the project are listed below:

  • Sources are available on the INRIA's Gitlab.
  • Continuous integration is performed using pipelines in Gitlab.
  • Issue tracker is available there
  • We use Squash to support the qualification activities of our applications

Architecture

The following diagram shows the architecture of the Gazelle testbed.

 

Gazelle architecture

 

Active projects

Product Registry (PR) The IHE Product Registry enables organizations to create, manage and publish Integration Statements for their commercial and open source healthcare IT systems. It allows users to browse for these systems based on their conformance with specific IHE Actors and Profiles. The system is open for use by developers and users now! more...
Gazelle HL7 Validator This is a web service (SOAP) based application to validate the HL7v2.x and HL7v3 messages produced by healthcare IT systems. A graphic user interface is also available to browse the XML conformance profiles (used for validating HL7v2.x messages) and the documentation of the model-based tool used to validate HL7v3 messages.
Gazelle Master Model (GMM) The Gazelle Master Model enables IHE Technical managers and IHE committee members to register information about integration and content profiles, actors and transactions. The test cases conducted during the connectathons are also stored in this application. The Product Registry and the various gazelle instances are synchronized with the content of the Gazelle Master Model. more...
Demographic Data Server (DDS) The Demographic Data Server is a tool used to generate fake patient identities to be used by Gazelle (or others) in the context of testing. The GUI allows the users to select a country and generate patient information valid for that country. The application also provides a web service interface ( wsdl) more... The tools supports generation of data in different locales : names and lastnames in the context of different countries. Addresses with valid zip codes, and finally support of different character sets.
External validation services Those services are available as web services (SOAP or REST) and enable the developers and users of IT systems to check the conformance of the messages and documents exchanged in the context of interoperability projects. Tools that conform to this REST API can be integrated into the Gazelle test bed and be offered as conformance services through the EVS Client tool. 
External validation Front-End (aka EVSClient)  The EVS Client tool is a web application that interfaces to the External Validation Services (EVS), developed as part of the Gazelle Test Bed or from external sources.
Test Management This is the test management part of Gazelle. It includes most of the modules developped in the context of Gazelle and presents the main interface the testers uses to test systems. 
IHE Connectathon Results This tools provide access to the connectathon results world wide. It allows to search the results per IHE Connectathon or per actor or per profile and then to export the results obtained into an excel file. Note that advance search mode is also available.
Simulators They are tools which are available all the year long over the Internet. Each simulator emulates the behaviour of one or several actors in the context of specific IHE profiles. It allows your system under test to interact with an implementation of the IHE specifications.
Proxy The proxy allows the capture of the messages exchanged by the participants to a test instance. The captured messages are stored in the Proxy. The Gazelle Control Module allow the user to associate captured messages with corresponding test instance for message validation in the context of the instance.

Achivements

Gazelle first components were first used during the IHE European 2009 connectathon in Vienna, Austria. At that time, registration, configuration management and results management were handled by Gazelle. The tests selection, running and grading was still performed using Kudu.

Gazelle was used again for the 10th European Connectathon in Bordeaux. This was the first time that Gazelle was used to run the Connectathon from the registration to the report of results.

Gazelle plateform was used to manage the following events : 

  • IHE Europe
    • Connectathons since 2009
  • IHE USA
    • IHE NA Connectathon since 2010
    • Eyecare 2012, 2013, 2014
  • DG Santé (European Commission)
    • Projectathons since 2010
  • IHE Japan
    • Connectathons since 2012
  • IHE Korea
  • Projectathons (Projectathons are smaller events than IHE Connectathon that are runs in the context of a project)
    • eHealthSuisse: Electronic Patient Record since 2018
    • ANS (France) since 2019
    • Ireland
    • Greece
    • LAC Pass
    • Brussels region
    • European Commission - DIGIT (Once Only Technical System project)