Description of Session
The Special Olympics Healthy Athletes program has been offering free health screenings and education to Special Olympics athletes for more than 20 years. During that time the organization has aggregated an immense and unique data set about the athletes which compete at their events globally. However, this data has been accrued as a series of health visits, each collecting specific data elements on a form. Special Olympics and VecnaCares are transitioning this data collection and storage system to a longitudinal health record, transforming individual screening data into a patient record in a custom-built system built using OpenMRS. The system is designed with accepted global best practices of data information exchange including the use of HL7 and FHIR protocols to standardize the data schema to integrate with existing systems. This session will identify key challenges to scaling a digital health system to a global deployment, and discuss lessons learned when transitioning from a single-visit system to a longitudinal health record.
