Enabling Semantic Interoperability of Disease Surveillance Data in Health Information Exchange Systems for Community Health Workers

Abstract

The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) advocates for the integration of distributed and heterogeneous health information systems. This is achieved through the development of standards that specify protocols through which the integrated systems can communicate as profiles. In Namibia, healthcare services are extended to communities through community health workers (CHW). Most CHW are sent to the field to educate and raise awareness of diseases in the communities. However, there is no platform for them to communicate the disease surveillance information to the regional and Head offices in real-time. The IHE, through its Information Technology Infrastructure Technical Framework Volume 2b Transaction B provides a Cross-Gateway Patient Discovery (XCPD) profile that can support the means to locate communities which hold patient-relevant health data as well as the translation of patient identifiers across communities that hold similar patient data. The XCPD profile can be adapted to support communication between the CHW, the DHIS-2 in the Ministry of Health and Social Services (MoHSS) and silo HIS in the regional hospitals, for them to share and also to exchange information within a health information exchange ecosystem. At the present moment, the DHIS-2 and the silo health information systems work in isolation simply because these HIS are heterogeneous, they are not interfaced and also not distributed. The study sought to develop a framework to enable the semantic interoperability of the DHIS-2, silo systems and CHWs for data semantic interoperability so that they can exchange disease-surveillance information.