InterSystems Brand Guidelines: The 1978 M-Language Firm Behind HealthShare and TrakCare

A database vendor from the hospital language.

InterSystems was founded in 1978 by Phillip T. “Terry” Ragon, who English Wikipedia says is still its chief executive; German Wikipedia gives the same founder and year, and the company’s own description begins “Established in 1978.” It is privately held.

Its roots are in MUMPS, the Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System, a programming language with a built-in database that has been known since 1993 as M, German Wikipedia notes. InterSystems was one of the vendors of M systems, with a product called ISM-11 for Digital Equipment’s PDP-11 minicomputers, English Wikipedia says. German Wikipedia adds that the company developed early versions of M for the IBM PC and the DEC VAX. It then bought rival implementations — DTM from Data Tree in 1993, DSM from Digital in 1995 and MSM from Micronetics in 1998 — becoming, in English Wikipedia’s words, the dominant M technology vendor.

Before its recent move, the company was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at One Memorial Drive. English Wikipedia records that in 2008 it went to court against Microsoft, a fellow tenant of that building, and against the building’s owner over space it said it had rights to; that in 2010 Ragon led a Cambridge coalition called Save Our Skyline against a zoning change that would have allowed more signs on top of commercial buildings; and that both disputes were settled, with the two companies agreeing to put only low signs at street level.

From Caché to TrakCare.

Out of those M systems came one product. The company combined their features into OpenM and then, in 1997, consolidated them as Caché, which added web support, object-oriented development and SQL access to the database, English Wikipedia says; at that point the company stopped new development of its older M products while continuing to support existing customers. German Wikipedia adds that the DeepSee analytics technology was built into Caché in 2008, and English Wikipedia that in May 2011 the company launched Globals, a free database based on the multi-dimensional array storage used in Caché. It launched Ensemble, an integration platform, in 2003 and HealthShare, a health informatics platform, in 2006; German Wikipedia gives the same dates. In September 2017 it announced the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, which German Wikipedia says became available on 31 January 2018 and which, the company said, combines database management with interoperability and analytics.

Its hospital system came by purchase. In 2007 InterSystems bought TrakHealth, an Australian company whose TrakCare modular healthcare information system was already built on InterSystems technology, and in September 2011 it bought Siemens Health Services France from Siemens, English Wikipedia says. TrakCare is sold outside the United States, and the Ensemble technology is now marketed mainly as HealthShare Health Connect.

The company’s website describes TrakCare as an EHR that supports interoperability standards, and lists TrakCare Lab Enterprise for clinical laboratories alongside it. It calls HealthShare “a suite of solutions,” including a Unified Care Record that brings together patient data from many sources, and also offers InterSystems IRIS for Health. Other healthcare products on its website include Health Insight, an analytics product; a Provider Directory that publishes information on providers’ relationships with patients, health plans and one another; Health Gateway, a cloud service for access to patient data; and Regional Health Connections, which the company says is aimed at care teams in under-served rural areas. Outside healthcare it lists InterSystems Data Studio, a cloud service, and InterSystems Supply Chain Orchestrator. Its customers are not only in healthcare: the company says its data platforms serve organisations in healthcare, finance and logistics.

Design and documentation.

Health-record software is hard to photograph. The product is a database and a set of screens used by clinicians, so the companies that make it tend to show the people around the software instead: a nurse or doctor with a tablet at a bedside, a patient checking a phone, a team gathered around a monitor. Where the software itself appears, it is usually as a clean chart, schedule or dashboard screenshot with invented patient details.

The patient portal has become one of the most visible parts of these brands. Phone screens showing test results, appointment bookings and messages to a care team are now a standard image in the category, because the portal is often the only part of a hospital’s system that patients ever see under the software maker’s own name.

Headquarters matter too. Several of the larger companies built campuses in their home towns and use them in their storytelling, from themed office buildings in Wisconsin to office parks in Kansas City. Those campuses host training, customer visits and, in some cases, the companies’ own user-group meetings, such as Epic’s UGM, which its website lists among its events.

The rest of the category’s public face is shaped by conferences. Trade gatherings such as HIMSS and HLTH bring vendors, hospitals and investors together each year, and companies stage their own events alongside them, like the Oracle Health and Life Sciences Summit. Booths, keynote stages and product demonstrations at these events supply much of the imagery the industry uses to present itself. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it today and what it says about its own software.

One word with a capital S.

In May 2022 InterSystems announced that it would move its corporate headquarters from Cambridge to One Congress, a new tower in downtown Boston, where it would take the top 14 floors of a one-million-square-foot building developed by The HYM Investment Group, joining State Street and the law firm K&L Gates as anchor tenants, REBusiness Online reported on 6 May 2022, describing InterSystems as a Boston-based provider of data management services and healthcare information systems. The company’s announcement said the tower, part of the Bulfinch Crossing development, had broken ground in June 2019 and that the lease left it fully let. The company’s announcement, dated 3 May 2022, said it expected to move in during 2024. English Wikipedia now gives One Congress as its headquarters, and the company’s website names it InterSystems Corporation of Boston.

The name is written as one word with a capital S, InterSystems, and its product names follow the same habit: HealthShare and TrakCare are compound words with an inner capital, while IRIS is set in capitals. Products are usually named with the company in front, as in InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS for Health.

For a design guide, InterSystems shows a technology company that puts its own name in front of its product names and keeps them in one compound style. Compare Epic Systems, another American health-record software company, and MEDITECH, another American hospital-software maker. For this guide we use a deep indigo and a cool aqua with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep InterSystems’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.