2019-03-07 Community Health Toolkit Meeting Notes

Owned by Brandon Bowersox-Johnson
Last updated: Mar 14, 2019 by Rebecca Alban (Unlicensed)
5 min read


Followup meeting with Francesca Garrett- the CHT Community Manager. Attended by Christine Lenihan and Rebecca Alban (Unlicensed)

Medic are technical stewards, but there are other organizations that input into it. Their aim is to make it easier to launch digital health initiatives in their community. 

toolkit includes- community health application framework- helps you to not have to start from scratch. provide a codebase that can be customized, also provide a suite of reference applications. They can be deployed as is, or be modified. Each one addresses a specific use case, or geography. They also include apps from other organisations. Open access design images

Just formalized a partnership with special olympics- screen for CHWs with disabilities

Have a Slack channel for developers

Creating an online community–in Discourse, meant to represent the CHT (not medic mobile). have categories or tags to track conversations about tools or apps. **opportunity fro our involvement. We could host a conversation, follow conversations that

What does it mean to be a partner? Formal partners have made commitment to community principles- to make resources to open access. (something to contribute). Governance structure reviews groups who are interested in partnerships. Trying to be very intentional with their initial partners. 

They will provide tech support on this- platform will create a place for implementers to help eachother. And medic will facilitate and steer them to the right organization. Community of implementers who can give their own best practices

These tools are what have been used in all of their field implementations- they are being provided as reference applications. They have all been field tested and have a demonstrative impact

the first tool was medic mobiles tool- they were first to contribute (obviously)

Current no standalone apps related to supply chain-- opportunity to explore interoperability 

Potential for scope to use the app is infinite - code can be modified in any way that people want to adjust their workflows. can be used in an endless implementations- maternal health, HIV AIDS, iCCM, many areas. 

Partners are 'technical contributing partners'- org that might do a build on their framework. Reference application library will be robust

standards or reviews of applications to include them in the toolkit? they are creating standards for creating standards, other than just open source code. Will be some expectations around documentation and ese of implementation. Ideally want something that could be deployed 'as is'. Still deciding whether it needs to have been field tested. The online forum- we may find ways to host or promote them. 

What are there most relevant use cases- not externally calling for, involves work where 

Could create a 'tag' for OpenLMIS sot hat if there are conversations that organically occur , and pull those into a Slack channel. in early stages happy to be building community. Want to make sure we are easily able to plug into conversations


Next Steps:

Toolkit is not even formally launched yet. They still need to finalize list of tools that they will include in the toolkit (initially, as it will continue to grow). They will rehaul the website with this info.

They are keeping us on a list of inteersted parties and will keep us looped in to the launch of the toolkit and online community . Once that is published we can review the tools and consider how VR/OpenLMIS can utilize them or (possibly contribute to toolkit)



Present: Michael Kohn and Marc Abbyad, Medic Mobile/CHT; Brandon Bowersox-Johnson, VillageReach and Josh Zamor, OpenLMIS

Agenda

1. Personal Intros

2. Summary of Medic's interoperability efforts: to-date and planned

3. Summary of VillageReach's interoperability efforts: to-date and planned

4. FHIR advice and/or resources

5. Medic / OpenLMIS

Notes

1. Personal Intros
Michael Kohn - been with Medic 3 years and supports with data & analytics, dashboards, postgreSQL infrastructure; also did warehouse software in the past, and now working on interoperability more. Marc Abbyad, Software Technologist and Product Manager at Medic, had some good collaborations with VR in the past. Brandon and Josh.

2. Summary of Medic's interoperability efforts: to-date and planned
In past years, they did a number of one-off ad-hoc integrations, especially to DHIS-2. But none of those really scaled or took off. One was in Kenya with a specific CSV format and import/export feature. They also prototyped an integration using Apache Nifi: based on schedule they ran a SQL statement on PostreSQL and sent to DHIS-2 using APIs. They are working now with an MoH partner to really define indicators and calculations more clearly. But all of this has been pretty custom. Separately, on OpenMRS implementers conference they built an integration sending data from Medic to and from OpenMRS using Apache Wifi. Also doing another one-off integration with a facility based tool.

3. Summary of VillageReach's interoperability efforts: to-date and planned
Brandon gave 3 slide background:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1hgx0OQNAngYW6zk2jYsDa1j9dKC899f9MFfjXypEJ4Y/edit#slide=id.g3727f1a773_1_126 (OpenLMIS Analytics Infrastructure
Integrations: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1hgx0OQNAngYW6zk2jYsDa1j9dKC899f9MFfjXypEJ4Y/edit#slide=id.g3cd8e0844c_0_0
Interoperability: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1hgx0OQNAngYW6zk2jYsDa1j9dKC899f9MFfjXypEJ4Y/edit#slide=id.g34f35b867e_0_89

Josh: Some of our plans with DHIS2, FHIR and the Data Warehouse stack are more aspirational.
- If you were to post a FHIR message to DHIS2, it cannot accept that yet (actually it can take in some patient FHIR data, but not aggregate data as FHIR yet). We don't have final project plans and money for DHIS2 to accept FHIR data directly, but we have general agreement that moving towards FHIR is a good thing. For now we are using a FHIR server and a service account that allows another system to retrieve those metrics. To transport to DHIS2 we're going to see if a partner might take on building a lightweight middle-layer and possible expand the support of FHIR in DHIS2 for aggregate data, our fallback if FHIR in DHIS2 can't be expanded in the short term will likely be to have that middle layer convert from FHIR to a format DHIS2 can accept - e.g. DHIS2. We hope to see most of this in OpenLMIS 3.6. After that, we have more aspirations such as:

  • Seeing more adoption of simple FHIR enabled Facility/Location Registries
  • FHIR representations / terminology of a Product
  • Hope to take on building a product that assists in MDM of Products - Master Product Data

Michael: Question: What do we use for interoperability layers and facility registries? Josh answered that we are solution-agnostic and also have options where OpenLMIS can be the temporary facility registry at first.

4. FHIR advice and/or resources


5. Medic / OpenLMIS

Brandon: Question: How can we stay in touch about supply chain interoperability with the CHT?
--> get Demo of CHT first, THEN talk about what touch points and workflows could look like.
Should CHT maybe make sure to have an OpenHIE interface?



Next Steps:

  • Get a demo of Medic Mobile and OpenLMIS
  • Josh will followup with Michael on slide 13 - the reporting stack slide - when he returns.

OpenLMIS: the global initiative for powerful LMIS software