The HISP Centre at the University of Oslo, with the support of the US CDC, has published a toolkit for integrating laboratory information systems with DHIS2.
The problem it addresses. Tracker programs used for case-based disease surveillance regularly need laboratory results. Sending those results electronically instead of entering them by hand speeds up decision-making, removes transcription errors between systems, and makes the information available sooner to health and management staff.
What the toolkit contains. Guidance on the integration patterns and standards involved, plus a working reference implementation you can run locally with Docker. The reference implementation imports lab results from a LIS into a DHIS2 Tracker program by fetching diagnostic reports from a mock LIS conforming to the HL7 Laboratory Report FHIR Implementation Guide, transforming them into Tracker events, and transmitting them to the DHIS2 Web API. An Interoperability Layer (IOL) mediates the exchange and bridges the structural and semantic differences between FHIR and DHIS2.
How it works in practice:
- The case is enrolled in a Case Surveillance program; a lab request stage records the specimen ID, which is the key linking the DHIS2 case to the LIS report
- When a matching report becomes available in the LIS, the lab result stage is auto-populated without human intervention, leaving a completed form for the surveillance officer to review
- Terminology mapping lives in DHIS2 itself: data elements and option set values are bound to LOINC codes through attributes, so an implementer can revise the LOINC-to-DHIS2 mappings directly in DHIS2 without involving the team maintaining the IOL
- The FHIR-to-DHIS2 transformation script is likewise held in the DHIS2 data store
It is meant as a technical guide for developing your own LIS–DHIS2 integration, and should not be used directly in production without adapting it to your local context.
Resources
- Documentation
- Reference implementation (GitHub)
- Webinar, 28 September 2026
- Laboratory Interoperability page
This work was developed with the support of the U.S. CDC, as part of our long-standing collaboration on strengthening disease surveillance and response.