Harmony 0.5: DICOM SCP support, hot reload, security improvements and Runbeam integration

We're excited to announce Harmony 0.5.1, a significant milestone that establishes Harmony as a production-ready secure data integration platform for healthcare organisations. This release delivers critical capabilities that healthcare IT teams have been requesting: zero-downtime configuration updates, enterprise cloud integration, and comprehensive medical imaging support.

For organisations building modern healthcare interoperability platforms, Harmony 0.5 represents a fundamental shift from proof-of-concept to production deployment. Whether you're orchestrating FHIR resources between clinical systems, managing DICOM workflows across imaging networks, or enabling secure data exchange between healthcare facilities, this release provides the operational maturity that production environments demand.

This release introduces four major capabilities: hot configuration reload for zero-downtime operations, Runbeam Cloud integration for centralised gateway management, production-ready DICOM SCP implementation with full medical imaging protocol support, and enhanced security with comprehensive encryption key management. Together, these features establish Harmony as a foundation for enterprise healthcare integration infrastructure.

Zero-Downtime Configuration Updates

One of the most significant challenges in production healthcare integration environments is maintaining continuous availability while updating routing rules, transformations, or backend connections. Harmony 0.5 introduces hot configuration reload—the ability to update routes, middleware, backends, and logging configuration without restarting services or interrupting active data flows.

The implementation uses a file-watching mechanism with intelligent debouncing (200ms) that detects configuration changes, validates the new configuration, and atomically swaps the runtime configuration without service disruption. If validation fails, Harmony automatically rolls back to the previous working configuration, preventing misconfigurations from impacting production operations.

For healthcare organisations, this capability is transformative. A radiology department can update DICOM routing rules during business hours without interrupting active imaging studies. A clinical data team can modify FHIR transformation logic in response to urgent requirements without scheduling maintenance windows. DevOps teams gain the agility to iterate rapidly while maintaining the reliability that healthcare environments demand.

The selective adapter restart mechanism ensures that only components affected by network topology changes are restarted, minimising disruption even during infrastructure updates. Configuration changes to middleware pipelines, routing logic, and backend connections occur instantly without patient-facing service interruptions.

Enterprise-Grade Cloud Integration

Harmony 0.5 introduces comprehensive Runbeam Cloud integration, enabling organisations to manage distributed gateway instances through a centralised cloud control plane. This integration bridges the gap between on-premise healthcare infrastructure and modern cloud-based orchestration platforms.

The authentication architecture uses JWT-based gateway authorisation through the Management API, providing secure, token-based identity management for gateway instances. Machine tokens feature a 30-day expiry with automatic lifecycle management, ensuring credentials remain current without manual intervention. Harmony implements secure token storage with native OS keyring support across platforms—macOS Keychain, Linux Secret Service, and Windows Credential Manager.

The cloud polling mechanism enables configuration synchronisation between the control plane and distributed gateway instances, including automatic download of transform specifications before applying configuration updates. This allows central IT teams to manage complex multi-site integration networks while maintaining local autonomy and data sovereignty.

For healthcare organisations implementing distributed interoperability gateway architectures across multiple facilities, Runbeam Cloud integration provides visibility, governance, and centralised management without creating data bottlenecks or compromising security postures.

Production-Ready DICOM Integration

Medical imaging workflows represent some of the most complex integration scenarios in healthcare environments. Harmony 0.5 delivers production-ready DICOM SCP implementation with comprehensive protocol support that healthcare organisations need for real-world PACS integration.

The DICOM SCP adapter provides complete support for essential medical imaging operations:

• C-ECHO for connectivity testing and verification of DICOM associations
• C-FIND query operations supporting patient, study, series, and image levels for comprehensive dataset discovery
• C-MOVE dataset transfer requests enabling traditional PACS-to-PACS image routing
• C-GET direct dataset retrieval for modern pull-based imaging workflows

What makes this implementation powerful is Harmony's data transformation capability. The DICOM SCP service can connect to FHIR data sources, transforming clinical data into imaging contexts. Conversely, FHIR-based applications can access imaging data through Harmony's SCU (Service Class User) service, bridging the gap between modern clinical APIs and medical imaging protocols. PACS systems can even retrieve imaging data from non-DICOM sources—Harmony transforms the data into proper DICOM format on the fly.

This bidirectional transformation capability means Harmony serves as a true EMR PACS integration layer that speaks both languages fluently. Radiology systems, clinical viewers, AI analysis platforms, and archival storage can all communicate through Harmony regardless of whether they speak DICOM, FHIR, or proprietary protocols. The automatic persistent SCP orchestration ensures DICOM services remain available for backend operations without manual intervention.

The DICOM capabilities complement Harmony's existing FHIR gateway functionality, enabling organisations to build comprehensive healthcare interoperability platforms that handle both clinical data and medical imaging through a unified integration infrastructure with seamless protocol translation.

Advanced Security and Encryption

Healthcare data security is non-negotiable. Harmony 0.5 significantly enhances security capabilities with comprehensive encryption key management and secure credential storage mechanisms that meet the requirements of regulated healthcare environments.

The encryption architecture supports multiple key management strategies depending on organisational security policies. Harmony can integrate with existing secret management infrastructure, whether HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or Kubernetes secrets. CLI-managed keys provide operational flexibility for development environments, while auto-generated keys offer secure defaults when explicit management isn't required.

These security enhancements support compliance requirements for HIPAA, GDPR, and Australian Privacy Principles (APPs), ensuring healthcare organisations can deploy Harmony with confidence that data protection standards are met throughout the integration pipeline. The combination of encryption at rest, secure token lifecycle management, and integration with enterprise key management systems establishes a security foundation appropriate for handling protected health information.

Transform Middleware Update

Harmony 0.5 migrates the transform middleware from fluvio-jolt to harmony-jolt. This change improves performance, reliability, and long-term maintenance of the transformation engine while maintaining complete compatibility—existing JOLT specifications work identically without modification.

For users building custom integrations with the transformation library, simply update your dependency references to harmony-jolt version 0.5.0. No changes to transformation logic or specifications are required.

Enhanced Developer Experience

Beyond the headline features, Harmony 0.5 includes significant improvements to developer experience and operational capabilities. The enhanced integration testing infrastructure makes it easier to validate configurations before deployment. Improved startup logging and diagnostics provide better visibility into adapter lifecycle and configuration state.

The network-aware unified startup mechanism with adapter registry management simplifies deployment across complex network topologies. Harmony now automatically generates management network configuration when enabled, reducing setup friction for organisations deploying management API functionality.

What's Next for Harmony

Harmony 0.5 establishes a production-ready foundation, but our vision for healthcare interoperability extends further. The community is exploring enhanced observability features, expanded protocol support, and deeper integration capabilities with emerging healthcare data standards.

We're committed to community-driven development. Your feedback shapes Harmony's roadmap—whether you're identifying gaps in protocol support, suggesting operational improvements, or contributing code. The healthcare interoperability challenges we're solving together require diverse perspectives from organisations deploying integration infrastructure in real-world clinical environments.

This release sets the foundation for increasingly sophisticated capabilities around consent management, data governance, and multi-tenant deployment models that healthcare organisations need as integration requirements evolve.

Get Started with Harmony 0.5

Harmony 0.5.1 is available now on GitHub. Pre-built binaries are available for macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Linux (x86_64 and ARM64), and Windows platforms. The comprehensive documentation includes deployment guides, security best practices, and configuration examples for common healthcare integration scenarios.

For organisations evaluating Harmony for production healthcare integration deployments, this release represents the operational maturity milestone that enables confident adoption. The combination of zero-downtime operations, enterprise cloud integration, comprehensive medical imaging support, and advanced security establishes Harmony as a foundation for modern healthcare data connectivity.

We're grateful to the community members who contributed feedback, testing, and code to this release. Healthcare interoperability is a complex challenge that requires collaborative problem-solving—thank you for being part of this journey.

Ready to experience production-ready healthcare integration? Download Harmony 0.5.1, explore the updated documentation, and join the community building the future of healthcare interoperability.

Welcome to production-ready healthcare data integration with Harmony 0.5.