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What Is Iguana?
Iguana is the ultimate integration engine for healthcare organizations needing custom interfaces that handle complex data workflows. Designed to connect any message format—HL7, FHIR, X12, JSON, and more— Iguana ensures seamless, real-time communication between your systems. With over 20 years of experience and thousands of global installations, Iguana is trusted by healthcare providers and vendors to streamline data integration, automate manual processes, and maintain compliance. Whether you’re dealing with EHRs, lab results, or billing data, Iguana simplifies the process so you can focus on delivering better patient care. Start building your custom interfaces today and connect any system with ease.
Who Uses Iguana?
For healthcare vendors managing interfaces across client sites, and healthcare providers—hospitals, clinics, and outpatient facilities—needing seamless, custom data integration solutions.
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Reviews of Iguana
Long Time Iguana User
Comments: Iguana helped us to overcome a variety of business challenges and to resolve some data aggregation issues without a lot of extra staffing. The integrations typically were brought up in a timely manner, and I cannot stress enough how easy the product is to support/manage.
Pros:
Iguana has served me well in multiple positions as an integration engine. I have used it as part of a product I supported in a previous position, and it ran without issues for my entire tenure (we used Iguana for ADT/orders interfaces). With another client, we used Iguana to manage multiple ADT interfaces, to create custom CCDAs, and to aggregate/manipulate data from flat file sources. The development and administrative tools are excellent, and I couldn't recommend them enough.
Cons:
I think for small-midsize clients, if they do not have this already, a cloud hosted solution would be ideal.
iNTERFACEWARE Response
3 years ago
Hi Edward, thank you for being a long-time customer, and for the wonderful review. We appreciate your suggestion!
Alternatives Considered:
Iguana Review
Comments: Iguana has allowed us to implement interfaces much faster then we could previously. Interfaceware is forward thinking, making positive changes often in route to an better and easier to use engine.
Pros:
The best feature for our team is the development and debugging in lua which can be done while you code, allowing for fast development and debugging.
Cons:
The use of Chameleon for creating and editing VMD's.
iNTERFACEWARE Response
3 years ago
We sincerely appreciate your thoughtful and honest feedback, Greg.
Iguana Top Dog for HL7
Comments: Mostly very positive HL7 dev is a breexe mostly and even non standard HL7 ()I wrote a custom sftp project) was easy to implement, the API is reliable and the API docs were easy to follow.) It seems to have most of what I'd need for HL7, lack of access to java libraries is a dissappointment, but I did not need them for the current project. Java acces is good simply becasue of the huge range of libraries available for custom integrations, I have written libraries for security, email, encryption, custom messge construction, date handling, PDF manipulation and extraction of petient data all of which requied java APIs.
Pros:
The IDE is second to none for rapid HL7 development. The ability to immediately see the result of code on data in the right panel is so good I don't understand why other platforms don't employ it or similar. However, this also leads to the one issue with the approach. If you have an integration that employs a database and the code is a self managing state engine, it becomes very diffcult to test as moving the cursor re-invokes the entire code and therefore changes state. Now that I know this, I can work with it, but it took almost 2 days to realise that that is what was happening inside a fairly straightforward state manager!!
Cons:
Configuration management is not separeated from deployable project. There is not way to build configs for environments and deploy a channel with the channe lof config or the internal integration config out of the box. You can with careful process and management achive this, but its too open to lazy or bad practise. I did come up with a way to achieve close to what I want though. I imported a config file for a project per environment, each config file tagged with "-DEV" "-PROD" etc to indicate the environment. An import statement (require) is configured to take an environment variable "ENVIRONMENT" set to the appropriate flag for that environment and then the imprt statement imports the config for that environment automatically. It works but it means that DEV and PROD have access to all configs, I'd rather see them separated.
iNTERFACEWARE Response
3 years ago
Thank you so much for your detailed review, Stewart. We appreciate your honest feedback.
Excellent HL7 Message Interface Engine
Comments: We are using Iguana to take an HL7 source of authority and send to 6 downstream systems. This includes multiple transformations to enable prior encoding from the legacy system to be maintained such that the accumulated multiple years of history data looks as though it came from the legacy system. Excellent and powerful product!
Pros:
The speed of message processing is superior. We reached a high water mark of 57 messages/second --- and I firmly believe the Iguana engine had the capacity for several times that throughput (it can only process at the speed of the sending source). I also appreciated the support of InterfaceWare which went above and beyond. Dduring our implementation, we were extended support above and beyond our expected support window several times. This enabled our organization to overcome a difficult situation on a weekend deployment (a Sunday).
Cons:
Nothing comes to mind. We have not explored the more advanced features of the Iguana software such as JSON, API's, etc.
iNTERFACEWARE Response
3 years ago
Hi Matt, we can't thank you enough for your kind words and positive feedback about Iguana. Your positive review means a lot to us and lets us know we're on the right track.
Iguana
Comments: Customers send us their data and we parse it out into a SQL insert query using a VMD and insert it into a database to be used by our product.
Pros:
I like that we can setup a channel to use for our internal software testing to generate mocked up data and customize it for our needs. The ease of using LUA to write scripts to manipulate data before we import it into our systems has been a huge bonus and takes customization for our customers to another level without having to change our software to meet their needs.
Cons:
I hope to see a release where an update can be made for all shared lua's accross multiple instances and a way to see which channels are actually using the shared lua's and its not just listed as require in case its needed in the future. I also hope to see a way to search for a specific line, field etc across all channels lua's. All of our channels do not have "standardized" scripts so when we find a way to better accomplish something, it would be nice to search and see who all is actually using the code.
iNTERFACEWARE Response
3 years ago
Hi Crystal, thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed review. We sincerely appreciate your thoughtful and honest feedback and your suggestions.