ORLANDO, Fla., Feb. 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Omnicell, Inc. today announced the release of OmniGate, an interface engine that will give hospital IT managers remote monitoring, alert functionality, and more rapid development and testing of new interfaces.

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The announcement was released at the 2004 Annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition being held this week in Orlando, Fla.

"The OmniGate system transforms and communicates data between disparate systems over a variety of communication protocols, improving communication from Omnicell's product line to the hospital's admissions, billing, pharmacy and materials management information systems," explained Robert Johns, Omnicell's manager of interface development. "It centralizes the management of all the hospital interfaces for all Omnicell solutions and also maximizes communication efficiencies between Omnicell's products."

OmniGate supports HL7 version 2.x and the upcoming version 3 interoperability standards, as well as a variety of other formats, including fixed-length record, delimited record, XML and X12 EDI files.

At its core, OmniGate uses XML (and related technologies) to provide translation services. By supporting open standards such as XML and XSLT, system integrators may use any number of available open-source or commercial tools to develop interfaces for OmniGate.

OmniGate runs as a Windows(R) service, in a background process regardless of the current logged-on user, and ensures that only users with the proper credentials can access the interface engine, according to Johns. "Administration is performed over HTTP or HTTPS using a Web browser," he noted. "The development platform is extremely flexible and allows multiple instances of the engine on a single server for testing or other purposes. Also, the user interface is highly configurable, enabling the logical and intuitive organization of live and test interfaces required in the healthcare enterprise."