DELVING INTO HIS INTEROPERABILITY

The Federal Capital Territory (FCT) deployed Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Systems to support administrative, financial and clinical management of its hospitals. The new EMR software did not capture the monitoring parameters and indicators for HIV care. Several implementing partners operated across the hospitals with different data collection systems. Clinicians had to complete numerous care forms which were then ascribed by data assistants into parallel electronic /manual data reporting platform provided by Implementing partners. This resulted in data quality issues (accuracy, timeliness and completeness). This created a unique opportunity to collaboratively develop a technical specification document for integrating HIV care and treatment into EMR systems in FCT. Clinical, workflow and communication forms were then redesigned for all the HIV thematic areas and integrated into the EMR as a separate module with an interface for aggregate level data reporting. The next challenge is to integrate data from multiple HIV systems into a central platform with extensible architecture that enables vital HIV information to be shared across multiple systems including the National Health Management Information System to inform planning. decision making and resource distribution.

How can you create a national health worker registry when competing databases already exist? One way is to create a shared national repository that draws a minimum data set from each database and shares back this larger, more comprehensive database back with the original systems. Sounds easy, eh? Well, the reality is anything but easy. HISP South Africa and IntraHealth International are working with the National Department of Health in South Africa to create a national health worker registry and Vincent Shaw and Luke Duncan will share their experiences from this voyage of discovery into the heart of systems interoperability. - How to create an agreed minimum data set with multiple competing stakeholders? - When to start discussions on actually sharing data to create that data set? - What should the system architecture look like? - Which technologies and methodologies to use on the software side? - What incentives (and disincentives) work on the human side? - Who gets to claim success and when? They will try to answer all these questions and more as part of a wider discussion on interoperability in the trenches of real systems operations. We expect these presenters to be added to a larger discussion on interoperability.

The Open Health Information Mediator (OpenHIM) is an open-source software application designed to ease interoperability between disparate information systems by providing a single point of entry into the services of a health information exchange (HIE). It provides secure communications and data governance as well as support for routing, orchestrating, and translating requests as they flow between systems. It is used internationally in a range of different settings, including PEPFAR’s global DATIM reporting system and MomConnect, South Africa’s national pregnancy registry and health service planning initiative. The OpenHIM functions as the OpenHIE Interoperability Layer reference technology, receiving transactions from different information systems and HIE services and coordinating the interactions between them. In addition, it provides a framework for the development and use of mediation services to transform incoming and outgoing messages to a form that other system components expect, and to support business logic by orchestrating transaction flows. These services, called mediators, can be developed in a range of programming languages and published in code repositories to be reused and adapted by other implementations based on their needs. This session will introduce participants to the OpenHIE architecture, the role of the interoperability layer and other HIE components, and showcase the latest developments in the OpenHIM. The session will provide an opportunity for participants to learn about the OpenHIM, how it’s being used across the globe, and how it can address a range of interoperability challenges at scale.