PRESENTATION TITLE: Towards a Flexible and Easy-to-Use DHIS2 Integration for Lesotho’s Health Information System
PRESENTERS:
Mr K.O. Setetemela
HMIS Manager at ICAP and Lecturer at National University of Lesotho
email: khobatha.setetemela@gmail.com
Mr L. Mphatsi
HMIS Manager at ICAP and Lecturer at National University of Lesotho
email: la.mphatsi@gmail.com
Date: Wednesday 22 June 2022, 13:00-15:00
ABSTRACT:
The Ministry of Health in Lesotho, in partnership with CDC, PEPFAR, ICAP and NUL, has made significant progress towards design and implementation of a national health information system (HIS) called eRegister. This is in line with the national strategic goal to strengthen health systems in the country through supporting research, development and implementation of an ecosystem of health information systems aimed at providing support for data analytics and evidence-based decision making. The current implementation of eRegister consists of a tailored OpenMRS and Odoo as EMR and ERP point of care (PoC) systems respectively. One of the key challenges of the system is that it lacks full integration between the different PoC systems already in use in the country and the DHIS2-based national data warehouse. As a result, it is currently impossible to conduct nation-wide composite analysis of medical stock and health data to support effective planning. This presentation outlines eRegister’s DHIS2 integration requirements, how an open-source Bahmni application was selected, customised and implemented nation-wide to bridge eRegister’s DHIS2 integration gap for the existing and future PoC systems.
The current production implementation of eRegister supports limited DHIS2 integration for the EMR PoC system and lacks DHIS2 integration support for the ERP PoC system. The EMR DHIS2 integration is implemented through OpenMRS DHIS Connector Module (DCM). Although the DCM provides an easy-to-use user interface for authoring reports and scheduling automated mapping of reports to DHIS2, it is tightly coupled to OpenMRS and cannot be extended to flexibly support integration between DHIS2 and the current ERP system and other future planned PoC systems such as the Enterprise Laboratory Information System (ELIS). Of the few candidate flexible DHIS2 integration solutions available in literature, such as OpenHIM and OpenFN, the Bahmni DHIS2 Integration App (DIA) has been found to be the most suitable for the eRegister context. The DIA offers a flexible framework for implementing integration solutions between DHIS2 and Bahmni-based PoC systems including EMR, ERP, ELIS etc but lacks an easy-to-use interface and does not support automated scheduling of reports to DHIS2. Therefore, because of its support for flexibility and extensibility, the DIA has been adopted as eRegister’s integration solution and has been customised locally to improve usability and support automation.
