The Qvera Interface Engine (QIE) is a strong fit for hospitals and health systems running HL7 interfaces on OPENLink who want an engine their own team can build in and support: HL7 v2 over MLLP with acknowledgments, FHIR, X12 and DICOM in one engine, with monitoring, email alerts and an error queue in a browser console, and high availability included on every licensing model. It connects to Epic and to Oracle Health Millennium (Cerner) alike, on-premise, in containers or in your own cloud. Interfaces move one at a time as QIE channels: the AI Companion converts custom code into QIE JavaScript, and Qvera engineers are available to assist with the move. QIE is in production today at more than 600 sites, running more than 25,000 interfaces and processing more than 50 million messages a day.
OPENLink has a long history. Siemens sold it for years as Siemens OPENLink, and in 2012 described it as “an application-independent interface engine”. It came to Cerner when Cerner bought Siemens’s hospital software business in 2015, and Oracle bought Cerner in 2022. Oracle Health lists it today among its developer tools: “OPENLink is a full-featured interface engine designed for creating, modifying, maintaining, and monitoring interfaces in a variety of configurations.”
Oracle has published no end-of-sale or end-of-support date for OPENLink, and names no successor to it. Nor does it publish a current specification, a price or a list of the systems OPENLink runs on. The most detailed public description we found is Siemens’s 2012 OPENLink brochure, which the comparison below quotes.
An OPENLink team has two choices:
Six things hospital teams on OPENLink ask about when they evaluate an alternative:
Yes, one interface at a time. Qvera engineers are available to assist your team, and each OPENLink interface keeps running until its replacement has been tested.
Oracle Health publishes no current technical description of OPENLink. OPENLink cells come from Oracle Health’s developer page and, where Oracle publishes nothing, from Siemens’s 2012 OPENLink brochure, marked “Siemens, 2012”: they describe the product as Siemens sold it then. “Not published” means we found nothing current from Oracle, not that the feature is absent.
| The product | QIE | OPENLink |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor and plans | Qvera; in active development, see the release notes | Oracle Health, which lists it among its developer tools; sold earlier as Siemens OPENLink, it came to Cerner in 2015. No end-of-support date or successor published |
| Building interfaces | QIE | OPENLink |
| How an interface is built | Channel editor in a web browser: receiver, mapping, condition and destination nodes | A graphical tool: “No programming experience is required to build interfaces” (Siemens, 2012) |
| Custom code | JavaScript, which can call Java libraries; the AI Companion writes, explains and converts code | “Microsoft Visual C++, COM objects, ODBC Adaptors, SQL queries, Java Wrappers, and other modules” (Siemens, 2012) |
| Lookup tables | ✓ tables with any number of columns, looked up in any direction | not published |
| Testing with sample messages | ✓ step a sample message through a channel one node at a time | not published |
| Healthcare standards | QIE | OPENLink |
| HL7 v2 | ✓ in the engine | ✓ “HL7 version 2.x and 3.x” (Siemens, 2012) |
| HL7 over a network connection | ✓ MLLP receiver and sender, with a TLS-secured variant | TCP/IP connections, with SSL (Siemens, 2012) |
| HL7 acknowledgments | ✓ returned before or after processing; destinations wait for each acknowledgment and resend | not published |
| FHIR | ✓ as a client and producer, JSON and XML | not documented |
| X12 | ✓ reads and builds X12; batch files whole or one message at a time | ✓ X12 “for the transport of financial transactions” (Siemens, 2012) |
| Web services | ✓ REST and SOAP, calling and hosting | ✓ “SOAP and RESTful web services” (Siemens, 2012) |
| DICOM networking (store, query, retrieve, verification, worklist) | ✓ in the engine | not documented |
| Running it | QIE | OPENLink |
| Operating system | Windows, as a service, or Linux; Docker and Kubernetes | not published |
| Database | Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL or MariaDB | not published |
| Where it runs | On-premise, in containers, or in your own AWS, Azure or Google Cloud account | “at your site or remotely as a cloud-based, remotely hosted system” (Siemens, 2012) |
| High availability | ✓ two or more QIE nodes share one database, with automatic failover; included on every licensing model | Redundant systems with “automatic failover of interfaces”, on IBM and HP clusters (Siemens, 2012) |
| Monitoring and alerts | Status by system, zone and channel; email alerts; status checks for outside monitoring tools | Alerts by Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) “to destinations, including a network management application” (Siemens, 2012) |
| Message search and errors | Message history per channel, searchable by field; error queue with replay | not published |
| Configuration history | ✓ every change, with who, when, and the values before and after | “a detailed historical journal of changes to any interface” (Siemens, 2012) |
| Support and licensing | QIE | OPENLink |
| Vendor support | 24/7 for system-down emergencies; phone support (8am to 5pm Mountain), email, customer portal and knowledge base | not published |
| Licensing and price | Channel-based, Enterprise or OEM; production, test and developer licenses included; Channel-based licensing starts at $9,980 per year for 2 channels; see pricing below | no price published |
Yes, in one engine. Anything QIE does for HL7 v2 it also does for HL7 v3, FHIR, DICOM including native DIMSE and DICOMweb, X12, ASTM, CDA and IHE profiles, over MLLP, REST, SFTP, file, database, message queue and network share. The Qvera DICOM Router is that same engine configured for imaging. No published description of OPENLink mentions FHIR.
It runs on Windows or Linux, in Docker or Kubernetes from images Qvera maintains, or on AWS ECS: on-premise, in containers, or in your own AWS, Azure or Google Cloud account, against Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL or MariaDB. Running engines at more than one site, or inside networks you do not control, is what the Remote Management Hub (RMH) is for.
The Qvera Interface Engine · The Qvera DICOM Router · Remote Management Hub
Whichever engines are on your shortlist, ask every vendor, Qvera included, to show the move using one of your own OPENLink interfaces. Ask what carries over, what is rebuilt, how the result is tested, and what the complete cost is once support, high availability, test and development environments, and the database the engine needs are included.
See how QIE compares with both, what its license includes, and how interfaces move.
See how QIE compares with Iguana 6 and IguanaX, and how Iguana teams move their Lua interfaces.
Qvera offers Channel-based, Enterprise, and OEM licensing models. Channel-based licensing starts at $9,980 per year for 2 channels and does not limit message volume. View Qvera Licensing and Pricing.
QIE is in production at more than 600 sites, running more than 25,000 interfaces and processing more than 50 million messages a day. Qvera has built healthcare interface engine software since 2008 and is SOC 2 Type 2 attested. See how QIE works with Epic and with Oracle Health Millennium (Cerner).
How this comparison is sourced: Qvera publishes this page and sells QIE. What this page says about QIE comes from Qvera’s own product documentation and production deployments; about OPENLink, from Oracle Health’s developer page and, where Oracle publishes nothing current, Siemens’s 2012 OPENLink brochure. All vendor information was last reviewed on 30 October 2026. Vendors change their products, so check their current documentation before relying on any single claim. Found something out of date? Tell us and we will correct it.
