Theme: Public-private partnerships using DHIS2

 Background: The DHIS2 community allows local teams from various countries and regions to share their local innovation, demonstrating its ability to solve local and global issues. Despite frequent interaction within the DHIS2 global community via the community of practice, most local teams need a living lab environment where innovations can be co-designed, tested, and proven by users in a live setting through continuous use and feedback to ensure full functionality and user acceptance. The UDSM DHIS2 lab is using the UDSM Hospital as a living lab model where medical personnel co-work with the developers and researchers to design, develop, and test different innovations that can best address existing standards and emerging HIS needs in a live-use environment. The EMR currently used at the UDSM Hospital was developed on top of OpenMRS (without the Bahmni layer) using the mixed expertise and live-use environment of the living lab. The living lab ecosystem also has enabled the development of Laboratory information systems used at the National Public Health Laboratory and the interoperability Adapter (iAdapter), a breakthrough solution for vendor-based EMRs and the DHIS2 integration.

Methodology: The motivation behind this initiative was the challenges of existing EMRs and the lack of interoperability within health sector systems. The complexity of these challenges required a collaborative working living lab environment to address them. The work processes and users’ needs are analyzed collaboratively, prototypes tested, and versions deployed in test servers and evaluated for improvements. The agreed-upon versions are deployed into live servers during a specified support period. The system issues are captured lively or received during weekly joint feedback meetings.

Results:The presence of the living lab aided in the development of a robust integrated EMR called the iCareConnect+ which includes a built-in DHIS2 integration module.  This system addresses the critical parts of the patient journey integration, from patient registration, consultation, billing, diagnostic services, and pharmacy, to post-patient management. The iAdapter was developed which provides the seamless integration of EMRs and DHIS2, as well as the full-fledged Laboratory Information System (LIS) currently deployed at the NPHL.

 Conclusion:A living lab provides an avenue for continuous research and innovations around digital health with medical workers, given the complexity of the healthcare setting. During the continuous system use and user feedback process, complex requirements are gathered to improve the quality of the system. The usage of iCareConnect+ has improved healthcare operations and the quality of patient care and health services.