Sybase Inc. is expanding the data-integration capabilities of its New Era of Networks E-Biz Impact integration server for the health-care industry. Release 5.3, which will ship this month, includes features to help health-care organizations comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act's transaction standards.

St. Luke's Hospital in Chesterfield, Mo., uses E-Biz Impact to link its clinical, billing, and hospital-information (including patient-registration and demographic data) systems with about 60 interfaces, says Scott Holtswarth, information services director. The software supports a range of data and messaging types, including EDI, the Health Level 7 standard used by many hospitals, and, in the new release, XML.

The new version will also support data and transaction standards mandated by HIPAA starting in October, and it can use Sybase's Process Server rules engine to handle HIPAA-regulated transactions. Release 5.3 offers improved message logging and auditing capabilities, as well as new monitoring, security, and configuration features. The software now supports the XML data interchange standard and can also connect to a number of enterprise resource planning applications. Pricing starts at $100,000.

Release 5.3's built-in links to the Sybase database are a big deal because they eliminate the need to develop custom interfaces, says Jeff Graham, technology manager at St. Luke's. The software's ability to combine processes or tasks running in memory will reduce the workload on the hospital's Unix servers, he says, adding that St. Luke's will likely install the software once it's available.

Sybase acquired New Era of Networks Inc., a developer of application integration software, early last year as part of its effort to reinvent itself as a supplier of enterprise infrastructure and integration software.

The number of IT products to help health-care organizations comply with HIPAA's privacy and transaction regulations has been growing. Last month, Informatica Corp. debuted data-integration and transformation software that translates data from proprietary formats generated by legacy systems into HIPAA-compliant formats.