I-TECH (a unit of the Department of Global Health, University of Washington) is working with CDC and the Clinton Health Access Initiative to support the HCMC Provincial AIDS Committee (PAC) to implement an overall eHealth Architecture in the PAC health care facilities in Ho Chi Minh City.
Why Blog?
We've become rather enthusiastic about the idea of keeping a public, transparent log of our progress. It seems counter-intuitive for most people to announce when things go wrong, or we hit a slow patch, but we found it's been helpful with our OpenELIS project in Haiti and Cote d'Ivoire, and our work in Kenya on OpenMRS, because it gives people a way to get oriented to what we're doing, to figure out how it relates to what they're doing, it exposes points for collaboration, and it lets the sponsors of our work know that we're working hard and getting things done.
As a quick introduction / overview, read on --
The main objective of the project has been to 1) share information across facilities and services for continuity of care, and 2) deduplicate patients to improve the management of the overall program. The strategy to meet this objective is to implement electronic health information systems where needed and to develop standards-based interoperability sharing data between systems.
An important goal as part of this project is local ownership by the PAC for sustainability after the funding for this project has ended. To meet this goal, we have chosen to use open source software as the foundation to develop systems that meet the needs of the PAC. This gives the PAC access to all code used within their architecture without any licensing restrictions or fees for use and modification.
The first phase of this project has been to develop:
- an MPI as the master database for patient identification, including fingerprints, identifiers, and demographics
- an EMR for use in the HIV outpatient clinics (OPC) using the open source platform OpenMRS
- Standards-based interoperability for patient identification and information retrieval between the MPI, the existing VCT clinics, and the OPC EMR, and,
- a consolidated database of patients to be housed at the PAC for records backup, patient transfer, and program reporting
Back to the intended use of the blog --
This blog is intended to provide a log of the projects progress, challenges, technical issues, and approaches taken and solutions found.
Our technical coordinator, Mr. Long, will post weekly status reports to inform stakeholders of the progress being made each week, intended scope of work for the next week, and any issues we are facing.
Our development partners will post their technical issues, which our development team within I-TECH and collaborators in OpenMRS can reply to with ideas for solving.
Lastly, we will post when updates to documentation is made for stakeholders to view and comment on.
Please send us any feedback on this blog, the project, or otherwise!
Kind regards,
Jan
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