Helex Terminology Ecosystem

A FHIR platform for authoring, serving and distributing clinical terminology

Built so that its claims can be verified on your own installation, not taken on faith. “Standards-compliant” is a claim almost every terminology system makes; this is one you can check in an afternoon, with the standards body’s own test suite.

Free, under Apache 2.0 with Commons Clause. Supported by HELEX Solutions Ltd and TalTech — Tallinn University of Technology. No licence fee, no per-server or per-concept charge, and no difference between an evaluation and a production installation.

The number, not the adjective

1,194 / 1,194 HL7 conformance tests passed

25 test areas, zero failures

~90 s to load a full LOINC release

€0 licence fee, source available

It is HL7’s suite, not ours The tests are published by HL7 and run with the official validator. We did not write the exam.

Measured the hard way The easy version of this test runs against fixtures held in memory. Ours also runs against the real editing database, with content written through the same path your authors will use.

You can re-run it yourself The runner is built into the product. Point it at your own installation and read the report — conformance as an acceptance criterion, on delivery and after every upgrade.

The same score opens the registry That result is the entry requirement for HL7’s terminology ecosystem registry. Taking the server through it is in progress.

What to ask other vendors

Which suite, which mode, how many tests — and can we run it ourselves, against our own installation?

Two products, because the two jobs are not alike

Authoring terminology and serving it have opposite risk profiles. Each gets its own product, and the separation is the point: the public surface carries no editing code and no write path to your content of record. They scale, patch and get exposed on separate schedules — and you can use one without the other.

TEDY The editor

Code systems, value sets, maps, naming systems, profiles
Workspaces bound to a git repository
Releases bundling pinned versions for coordinated publication
Tasks linked to the content they concern
Built for a small, named, highly privileged group

Teagle The viewer

Search and expansion across every source at once
Your content, SNOMED CT, LOINC, HL7 vocabularies
Partner servers and published implementation guides
Answered through one endpoint
High volume, read-only, safe to expose

Flint The engine both embed

Published as a Java library, not a service
One conformance result covers both products
Behaviour proven in the editor is identical in the viewer
R4 and R5 served from one content set; R6 mount reserved
Your own Java application can embed the same engine

Terminology that distributes itself

Terminology is federated by nature — no single server owns SNOMED CT, LOINC, HL7’s vocabularies and your national extensions at once.

Subscriptions — systems are told, not left to poll An external system is notified when terminology changes, in seconds, instead of rediscovering it on the next nightly sweep. It is the FHIR standard’s own mechanism, so any conformant system can subscribe.

A change and its notification succeed or fail together A notification can never announce a change that was rolled back, and a change cannot commit without its notification queued. There is no window where the two disagree.

A notification is a hint, never data A system that is told “this changed” re-reads from the authoritative source. Nothing in the message is trusted, so a forged notification costs a wasted read rather than corrupted content.

Syndication — a network that stays in step National to regional, central to partner, production to test. An open standard rather than a replication protocol only one vendor implements — so the network you build is not a network you are locked into.

The properties audits ask for

Published releases stay published A value set published in 2024 still expands in 2027 to what it expanded to in 2024 — a property of how versions are pinned, not a snapshot someone remembered to take.

Nothing is ever destroyed Retired, never deleted. Historical records keep resolving.

Every change is attributable Who changed what, when, and in which release — the question a clinical safety review, an incident investigation and an auditor all ask.

Your identity provider, not another account store The installation authenticates against what you already run. Where that is bespoke, it is a supported extension rather than a fork.

Your brand, your palette, your languages Product name, logo, footer, menu shape and default theme are deployment settings, not a rebuild. The interface runs in the national language while content is maintained in several.

Units validate and convert correctly UCUM is answered natively: mg/dL validates against g/L, a class of clinical data error terminology servers routinely cannot catch.

Import what you actually receive Spreadsheets from a clinical working group — CSV, TSV, Excel — with a preview before anything commits and validation that says what was wrong and where. Also FSH. Export comes back in a format the importer accepts.

Your extensions live beside the product A module your team builds is registered alongside ours and survives our next upgrade — because it was never merged into our code.

At a glance

Cost	Free. Apache 2.0 with Commons Clause, no licence fee. Supported by HELEX Solutions Ltd and TalTech
Conformance	1,194 / 1,194 on HL7’s own suite — re-runnable by you, on your installation
FHIR releases	R4 and R5 served from one content set; R6 mount reserved
Architecture	Separate editor and viewer over one proven engine
Distribution	FHIR Subscriptions and server-to-server syndication, on open standards
Tenancy	Tenant-aware identity and notifications; one boundary, expressed once
Reach	Your content, SNOMED CT, LOINC, HL7 vocabularies, partner servers and published guides — through one endpoint
Scale	A full LOINC release — about 3 million rows — in about ninety seconds
Trust	Published versions immutable, nothing destroyed, every change attributable
Fit	Your identity provider, your brand, your languages, your extensions

Evaluate it in an afternoon

Three steps, none of which needs a proposal cycle.

1. Run HL7’s conformance suite against a sandbox The runner is in the product; the run takes an afternoon. The number on this page becomes your number, on your installation.

2. Load your own content A spreadsheet from a working group imports with a preview and a validation report that says what was wrong and where. A full LOINC release takes about ninety seconds.

3. Give your architects the technical brief It states every known limit in one table — judge it on what it discloses as much as on what it claims.

Talk to the team

There is no sales motion to get past. Adopting organisations work with the team directly on migration, on the features their deployment is missing, and on support — free of charge. Write to info@helex-solutions.com.