My name is Nathan McEachen and I am the CEO and founder of TerraFrame based in Lafayette Colorado in the United States.
I am privileged to be co-presenting with Scott Russpatrick and Vladimer Shioshvili (Challenges of maintaining organization hierarchy from the perspective of a global system) on Thursday, June 23rd, from 10:30 to 11:15 at the session: DHIS2 and Master Facility Lists /Registries.
Here is the abstract of my portion of the session:
Health information systems (HIS) used for decision making often have different pictures of the geographies (i.e., populations, places, and infrastructures) they respectively cover. Within a single area, different programs and systems collect and store different geographic data in silos at different times, leading to discrepancies and duplication of effort. This also results in decisions based on incomplete and out-of-date geographic data, ineffective resource allocation, and in the worst cases, affected populations being missed completely, especially during times of crisis.
Integrating data across silos to address this problem is difficult. The first difficulty lies with most HIS supporting only a single hierarchy - a single way of relating various org units (e.g., a health facility may map to a village in one system, but map to a health facility catchment area in another system). While all systems can be required to conform to the hierarchy structure of a single system, this approach does not always meet the diverse needs of every program. For example, a hierarchy configured for reporting purposes may not be best suited for a health worker, client, or facility registry. Secondly, these systems also use different representations of the same org units, such as identifiers and labels, that are not semantically equivalent in a machine-readable way. Thirdly, these systems do not track how org unit attributes, geometries, and relationships change over time.
GeoPrism® Registry (GeoPrism) is an open-source Common Geo-Registry (CGR) implementation that has recently implemented support for FHIR with the goal of providing common geographies and hierarchies for Instant OpenHIE components. Just as a terminology service can standardize vocabularies for interoperability, a CGR standardizes location identity, classification, geometries, and how locations are used in multiple and interrelated hierarchies through time.
We will demonstrate how multiple and interrelated hierarchies as they change over time can be modeled using a spatial knowledge graph in GeoPrism. By using common geographies, different organizational hierarchies can be managed across multiple instances of DHIS2 that receive updates as changes to org units are made. Geoprism can provide historical views of hierarchies for different periods of time so that trend analysis can be performed against operational data captured for those periods. Additionally, we will demonstrate the UI-driven DHIS2 integration module and how it is being used in Laos for an MOH implementation, as well as the integration API.
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