The Story of Open Integration Engine
How a community came together to preserve open source healthcare integration.
In 2006 Mirth Connect™ was established as a pioneering, open-source integration engine designed to tackle the complexities of healthcare data exchange, particularly with standards like HL7. Its powerful, graphical, and community-driven design made it a vital tool for connecting diverse IT systems, leading to an estimated 100,000 production instances being run in over 40 countries.
Following shifts in ownership and strategy, NextGen Healthcare stopped supporting Mirth Connect™ 4.5.2 and moved to a commercial license starting with version 4.6. The community of users and contributors recognized a need to safeguard the project's original open-source mission and ensure its long-term viability.
Open Integration Engine (“OIE”) emerged as a “rescue fork” of the original codebase.
Motivation Behind OIE
Preserve Open Source
Guarantee the core technology remains free, accessible, and independent of commercial pressures.
Maintain Focus
Prioritize development and governance based on the direct needs of the implementation community.
Ensure Longevity
Create a dedicated, community-run project to evolve the platform for new integration challenges.
How OIE compares to the other Mirth Connect™ forks
If you run Mirth Connect™ today, you have three viable options: OIE, BridgeLink, or commercial Mirth Connect™.
All three share the same channel architecture, so any of them will run your existing channels. Where they differ is how open each one is, and who maintains and governs it.
| OIE | BridgeLink | Mirth Connect™ 4.6+ | |
|---|---|---|---|
| License | MPL 2.0 | MPL 2.0 engine, web admin under BSL | Proprietary |
| Free, no paid tiers |  | Tiered licensing | License fee |
| Plugins, free and open | All, MPL 2.0 | Vary by license tier | Paid extensions |
| Open source web administrator | | Restricted (BSL) |  |
| Your custom plugins, recognized at runtime | | Vendor must build them in | Vendor-controlled |
| Community-governed, vendor-neutral | | Single vendor (Innovar Healthcare) | Single vendor (NextGen) |
| Commercial support | Independent vendors | Vendor-led | Vendor-led |
| Mirth-compatible | | | |
Comparison based on each project's published licenses, as of September 2026.
Where OIE is different
OIE builds on the open source foundation Mirth Connect™ established, and takes that openness further. Every OIE plugin is free and licensed under MPL 2.0, with nothing held back for a paid tier. Capabilities that cost extra elsewhere are open in OIE: the TLS Manager Plugin handles certificate management comparable to NextGen's paid SSL Manager extension, and Role Based Access Control provides user permissions comparable to NextGen's paid User Authorization extension. Both are free and maintained by the community.
BridgeLink open-sources its engine under MPL 2.0, but ships its web administrator under the Business Source License, which by its own terms is not an open source license and may not be used with any integration engine other than BridgeLink. OIE has a web-based administrator as well, and like every OIE plugin it's fully open under MPL 2.0, reusable without restrictions.
OIE also has the most active open development and community of the three. The work happens in public on GitHub, and an active Discord is where many experienced Mirth Connect™ practitioners now help each other day to day.
BridgeLink is a trademark of Innovar Healthcare.
Built to stay independent
OIE is governed by its community. No single vendor controls it. To protect that independence for the long term, the project joined the Eclipse Foundation, a vendor-neutral home for open source software.
The name and marks are now held by the Foundation, so no one company can take OIE private, change its license, or put it behind a paywall.
OIE continues the legacy, building on a proven foundation to provide a robust, community-governed integration solution for the future.
We're one of several vendors that support OIE, so you're never locked to us. We contribute to the project, we built and donated the open source TLS Manager Plugin, and we offer product support contracts. For teams that want the engine run for them, there's Managed OIE: high availability and monitoring, with a team to call. You get the confidence of enterprise support and the freedom of open source.
OIE Resources
The official Open Integration Engine website.
Join the OIE community on Discord.
Source code, issues, and contributions.
Community-maintained OIE wiki and user guides.
NovaMap TLS Plugin for OIE — full user guide (PDF).
FAQs on running OIE dev instances — administrators, setup, and support.
Need product support for OIE?
NovaMap Health offers product support contracts for Open Integration Engine. Get expert help when you need it, with SLAs and direct access to engineers who know the platform.
